Clarissa Tossin

Clarissa Tossin: Hi, my name is Clarissa Tossin.
 
This series of sculptures, The Mayan, is based on the interior design of the Mayan Theater, in Downtown Los Angeles.
 
I rubbed layers of silicon on sections of the walls and doors, and some other interior design details of the Mayan Theater and then peeled it out. I combined them with some hand gestures and feet positions that are based on ancient Mayan pottery and murals where dancers, or performers, or ceremonies are being depicted.
 
The Mayan Theater is a building that is really rich, in the way it used specific archaeological sites and mythological figures into its interior design. Part of my work was to find the original sources. Because it's really the combination of three archaeological sites, but made into a Theater.
 
In this series of sculptures I wanted to make the building dance, or to make the building embody some physical bodily qualities. That's why the imprints of the building are made out of silicon. It’s this really soft and drape-y material that speaks more to the body than the rigidity of walls and architectural structure.
 
It was an interest in architecture and the relationship with Mesoamerican and Mayan templar structure, and how it was recreated, reformulated, and how it became a historical movie theater in a city that today has big part of the population who is Mayan. I'm not sure how aware they are of these buildings. My question was, what does it mean to have these spaces as landmarks and historical buildings, and how they relate to the cultural fabric of that city today? It was interesting to do this archaeology of the present.
 
The work doesn't try to make a claim that it's closer to the Mayan culture than the building ever was—that it's acknowledging that the history of The Hollyhock House needs to be revisited and acknowledged.