Amaru

Chile´s physical and human geography has been a great source of inspiration to me.  The images that I create live at the crossroads of the real and the imaginary, the rural and the urban, the ancestral and the new. Syncretism, in its varied forms, still tinge the layers of global modernism in our Chilean daily life.

The imaginary world of Chile´s myths and legends represents a fertile ground for my imagination which borrows characters from stories heard, in versions of different hues, depending on the time and space in which they were collected.

The figurative comes naturally to me and it is evidently charged with a symbolic language, arbitrary in its interpretation, negotiated in the color scheme. However, this interplay of free interpretations aims to invite the observer to be a witness to a story that underlies his/her own personal narrative.

Biography

Since she was very young, Amaru showed a great ability for creating things by drawing, sewing, and building. Throughout her school years, she excelled at daydreaming. Even though school was not a welcoming place for imaginative children like her, art was one of the subjects she truly enjoyed. While pursuing a construction degree in college, she decided to take drawing lessons at the School of Fine Arts in Vina del Mar.
Later she discovered street theater and dropped out of college to work on the streets of Santiago. Performing with TEUCO and Sociedad Anonima, two street theater troupes, was her first real art school. Mask and prop  designing, dance and singing, stilt walking, acrobatics and acting were part of everyday training for performances, giving Amaru a tremendous experience in the arts. Living under a dictatorship, which brutally repressed any sign of dissent, marked her understanding of the power of art. Thus, aesthetics, content and function concepts regarding artistic expression were imbued during these years.
In 1992 she moved to Minneapolis, USA and while working as a mime and Spanish teacher, she studied and obtained a bachelor's degree in Theatre Arts and an MFA with a concentration in painting and drawing.
Currently she works as a painter in Concon, Chile.

Born in Chile, 1965. Birth name: Marcela Jazmín Rodríguez Aguilar