The end is my beginning. It’s been ten years since I moved to Los Angeles, and only now am I becoming Californian. But my California is populated by shadows of Europe–even if Novalis and Caspar David Friedrich are now sharing a bungalow in the hills with their contemporary popular culture counterparts. If Arte and Merv Griffin co-produced a reality TV show, it might go something like this.IIPessoa hails from the state of Minas Gerais–the land of Baroque and Rococo, soapstone mines, vast celestial nightscapes, and reserved temperaments–elements inextricable from her philosophical practice, channeled in her work. The concepts of time, intuition, and primordial memory guide her output–the creatures of her Botânica paintings recall those of prehistoric cave paintings; her Mimesmas sculptures conjure mollusk fossils or ancient tools of stone. Her art privileges the organic–she mines the primal realms of the psyche by means of hair, dry leaves, leather, oil, fat, wax, animal blood, minerals, powder, pigment, plants, roots, moss, seeds, and eggs.