Cuerpos Celestes features a combination of sculpture, painting, collage, and video, densely layered on panels and forms with imagery pulled from Astudillo’s personal archive. Drawing from a history of extensive medical experiences, Astudillo’s work engages the body as both an archive and a site of vulnerability. Through extensive movement in different countries, from being born in Ecuador, living in Canada for most of her life, and moving to the US, making the work function as an extension of memory transformed, fragmented, and reconstituted into tangible form. How does repeated physical displacement affect the physical body and the memory of home? 

A crucial component of the exhibition, the relationship between the video works and sculptural “bodies” acts as a translation for how physical trauma/medical pain manifestations are present in her life. With this, living memory isn’t a space of the past but rather a place for reconstruction towards forgotten experiences. How do these physical “objects” of memory interact with the viewer?