For a long time Ana Tiscornia' work has focused on memory and social oblivion: 'It is my silent charge against forgetting'. This is complicated because forgetfulness and silence are alike, both mark the place where what has been avoided stirs. Silence makes possible that which is sayable; forgetfulness, repetition.

In her recent works, Tiscornia has been making discrete objects, sculptures, and collages that result from the manipulation and intervention of common tools, pieces of furniture, cardboard letters, sheet rock, insulation, and other familiar materials. These constructions and visual rearrangements of everyday objects appear both obscure and familiar. They draw upon the paradoxical bond between architecture -a language of construction par excellence- with that of destruction and dislocation.

'In rearranging the various materials I seek a potential poetics -a kind of cartography of social oblivion- that is simultaneously exposing but also recovering scattered fragments ... of the utopian project. Somehow I am trying not to reconstruct but to organize them in a new project. Although specific political circumstances and catastrophes prompt me to make these pieces, these works look to a shared global moment and do not literally correspond to any one particular incident or place. They rather scrutinize how can mediums be pushed beyond their traditional associations, and still protect from erosion complex and nuanced social meanings. '

For her first solo show at Alejandra von Hartz Gallery, Tiscornia will also present a newly developed group of large paintings, and cardboard pieces that resulted from a previous series of collages which she started overlapping cut outs of digital drawings of renderings of houses in disarray. From her perspective, ideas and technical solutions are inseparable, so the pieces in the exhibition, in different media, aim to stand by themselves while being part of an installation that allows various dialogues.

Ana Tiscornia was born in Uruguay in 1951 where she studied architecture at the Universidad de la República. Since 1991 resides in New York. She is a Emeritus Professor at SUNY College at Old Westbury. Her work, extensively shown, includes the most recent solo projects at Point of Contact Gallery, Syracuse; Volta 2011 New York represented by Alejandra Von Hartz Gallery; Galería El Paseo, Uruguay; ARCO 09 in Madrid; On Location at Allegra Ravizza in Milan; and Noticias Breves at Centro Cultural Recoleta, Buenos Aires. Additionally, Tiscornia has participated in group shows

such as Esa Vara. Modernity and emplacement, Museum of Contemporary Art and Design, Costa Rica; Microwave 8, Josee Bienvenu Gallery, New York; The Disappeared, University of Wyoming Art Museum. The artist represented Uruguay in the II and IX Bienal de La Habana, Cuba, and the III Bienal de Lima, Perú. She has been a recipient of the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant. Tiscornia is the author of the book, Vicissitudes of the Visual Imaginary: Between Utopia and Fragmented Identity, published by White Wine Press with Distrito Cuatro. Recently, she curated La Guerra que no hemos visto, which debuted in 2009 at the Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogota and traveled to Museo de Antioquia in Medellin, El Museo de la Tertulia in Cali, and Frost Museum in Miami.