Maite Iribarren Vázquez

Reassembly, installation 1

Reassembly, installation 2

Insulated Arterial Cluster

Refrigerating Orifice Node

Refrigerating Orifice Node, detail

Prosthetic Bust

Prosthetic Bust, detail

Industrial Breast Milk

Industrial Breast Milk, detail

Transubstantiation Valve

Transubstantiation Bell

Transubstantiation Bell, detail

Neck Vent

Reassembly was the title of the 2026 Bard MFA thesis exhibition presented at Bard’s Massena campus, which was formerly the Hudson Valley compound of the Unification Church, better known as the Moonies cult. The space had been recently retrofitted to meet building codes making it legally suitable as an institutional cultural space. The work speaks to bureaucratically prescribed translations like this one, which reorganize how bodies are choreographed through space. The thesis exhibition context provided a campy caricature of the concepts of cultural standardization, dogma, translation and synthesis, which the work engages directly.

These works are part of an installation that presents an imagined infrastructural system. Rags hastily wrapped around leaky pipes are petrified in metal, the gesture of a quick fix becoming the system itself. They hold uncanny silicone tubing embedded with chiming steel balls, referencing the bells the artist used as a child altar girl in Catholic mass to make what she was told was the sound of the Holy Spirit when bread and wine were transubstantiated into the body and blood of Christ. An icy opalescent liquid provides a fluid element to the installation, resembling a synthetic milk. These fragments hint at a larger, unintelligible, open system that oscillates between being part of an organic body and an industrial architecture.

Transubstantiation Bell
silicone, steel chiming baoding balls
6’ x 15” x 2”

Transubstantiation Valve
cast aluminum, oil paint, silicone breast implant, lip stick, emergency light, hardware
8” x 9” x 7”

Refrigerating Orifice Node
cast aluminum, oil paint, silicone, steel chiming baoding balls, refrigerant milk, hardware
6” x 10" x 5”

Prosthetic Bust
cast aluminum, silicone breast implants, refrigerant milk
8” x 11” x 10”

Industrial Breast Milk
cast aluminum, oil paint, borosilicate glass, refrigerant milk, silicone, hardware
21” x 5” x 4.5”

Neck Vent
cast aluminum, oil paint, steel pipe
10” x 30” x 28”

Insulated Arterial Cluster
cast aluminum, copper pipe and fittings, rubber, ceramic insulators, copper fasteners, refrigerant milk
16” x 28” x 26”