Untitled, by Ilya Noe, 2003 - gift from the artist
Ilya Noe was born and raised in Mexico City and has since then expanded her zone of propagation: exhibiting in Italy, Spain, Portugal, Canada, the United States, and yes, Mexico. Invited to the 2nd European Landscape Biennial in Barcelona and to the two most recent editions of the International Art Biennial of Cerveria in Portugal, she has also represented her country in Venice’s OPEN 2000. In 2003 she became a UNESCO-Ashberg Laureate, and a year later was recipient of one of Mexico’s National Young Art Awards. Ilya has also worked on film and radio, and is currently pursuing a PhD in Performance Studies at the University of California, Davis.
Ilya’s work has often involved the re-creation of history, as seen through the pliable lens of memory — whether it is making site-specific three-dimensional houses based on the drawings of houses she made as a child while killing time in her father’s architectural office, or tracing the shape of a deer on the streets of a Portuguese town that takes the deer as its namesake (but where the deer were hunted to extinction), or creating detailed forensics of painted canvases that have been painted over and over again as palimpsests. She sees her task as the “archeological excavation of future work.” She finds freedom in backward movement.
Katherine Milton, PhD 