Colorful urban art installation with a large digital screen in front of a city building.

BUOYANCY

MJ Arguedas (2025)

BUOYANCY reimagines three existing signage frames on Exchange Street and Union Street— transforming ordinary spaces into compelling new artworks.

Artist statement

Portland’s Old Port is host to dynamic ecosystems among a shoreline of memory, where tides carry stories reaching back to 11,000 BCE.

This fabric installation is a reflection on its waters and the countless threads woven along the shore— wildlife tracing ancient migration patterns, vessels crossing in trade and lives entwined across time.

Layered threads echo vast webs of interconnection that bind past to present and harbor to horizon, nestled within frames reflective of the vibrant lobster buoys that are iconic symbols of Maine’s heritage. The work is both map and memory: a living fabric that stretches beyond centuries into what is still to come.

The installation includes a sign on Exchange Street and two signs on Union Street.

Colorful outdoor art installation with red string art in a yellow frame.

Installation date

October 2025

Location

Old Port Square

Materials

Fiber, acrylic

Artist pouring colorful fluid paint on canvas for abstract art piece.

Colorful illuminated art display outdoors at night in an urban setting.

Woman working on a vibrant orange string art sculpture at TEMPOart.

Group of diverse people waiting in line outside a building on a city street.

About the artist

Margarita Jane Arguedas (b. 1990, MN) is an emerging, Portland-based artist whose practice is centered on the act of deconstructing knit fabric by hand to its most fundamental form, engaging with it as a living material. This process becomes a meditation on interdependence, transformation, and the unseen forces that bind us.

The installation was commissioned by Old Port Square in partnership with TEMPOart.