Coming to terms with the notion of place was one of the defining issues of the 1990s. It is a concern that continues to resonate for us today. How is it that we, as individuals (and members of a variety of communities), define and locate ourselves, charting our origins, relations, experiences, and desires, in a world characterized by endlessly shifting boundaries?

How have changes over the last several decades, in the geo-political landscape and in the manner in which we travel, communicate, and conduct business in a global marketplace, affected the way we perceive and navigate public and private space?  In 1995 the French cultural anthropologist Marc Augé posited the notion of  "non-places," which he defined as one of the new norms of "supermodern" existence.

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The photographs of María Martínez-Cañas are among the most visually and semiotically complex images of our time – and even, one could argue, of the entire history of the photographic medium. They require the kind of sustained attention and interpretation that we are more used to bringing to works of literature than to works of visual art.

Quite literally, her pictures need to be read as much as looked at, since their meanings are embedded in both their overall appearance and their individual images, as well as in the interrelationships of these macro and micro levels of looking.

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Nature as a dominant subject in works of art began to appear only in the seventeenth century In the European Baroque era artists demonstrated a sensitivity to the observed world in a way that they had never done before. As art historian Kenneth Clark and other have noted, the landscape tradition of Italy, France, Flanders and Holland was born in the seventeenth century as artists often ceded pride of place to the natural world.

No longer was humanity necessarily the critical component the image and indeed in many landscapes artists eliminated the human figure altogether in their works, This was also the era of the rise of the still life. The objectification and analysis of individual objects such as fruits or flowers for their empirical value was raised to a new height in the Baroque period.

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Maria Martinez-Cañas initiated significant thematic and technical changes in her photography at the end of the 1990s. In a brief two-year period, from 1998 through 1999, the artist began using her body as well as nature in her work. Flight (Hospital Bed) and Prima Materia feature images of parts of her body; Garden and Metamorphosis, organic materials. The four series, from 1998, were photograms, images made without a camera on light-sensitive paper. By using this method, rather than materials such as Rubyliths and Amberliths, the artist achieved a sense of immediacy on photographic paper.

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