Untitled

Talya Petrillo

Silicone, pigment, asphalt, steel on untreated canvas.

18.5" x 19" x1"

This small wall-hung sculpture is part of a series of mazes I made during the pandemic, as an ongoing attempt to process a time defined by contradiction, collapse, and the illusion of control. Unlike a labyrinth, which offers a singular and meditative path, a maze is a structure built to mislead. That felt closer to what was unfolding around my community in downtown LA, but also on a global scale: a scramble of rules to survive by, a shifting of personal priorities, and the strange corporate and political gamification of what counted as “essential.”

I started making these mazes from homemade paper pulp, and surfaced this one in confetti. Structurally, they emerged intuitively. I routed their paths quickly and reflexively, but reinforced their walls and layered them slowly over time. The scale is deliberately modest, allowing the forms to resist their own logic—not quite puzzles to be solved, but reflections of a disoriented psyche: a mind pulled in too many directions, humorously undercut by the fact that the solution is already visible.