Sacred Conversations

Sacred Conversations was presented as part of First Generation, a collective thesis exhibition celebrating first-generation artists and their stories.
At the heart of the installation stands a reimagined confessional booth — an immersive sculptural space that draws on indigenous symbolism and purification rituals to transform confession from an act of guilt into one of empowerment. Designed as a participatory sanctuary, the booth invites visitors to release emotional burdens, engage in honest dialogue, and experience collective healing rooted in Latin American cultural memory. Through community care, touch, and shared presence, it becomes a temporary space for introspection and renewal.
Surrounding the installation is a series of paintings that extend this exploration of identity, family, and cultural heritage. Each work portrays a family member through the artists eyes, reinterpreted through a distinctly Latin American visual language; talavera tiles, stained glass, and indigenous iconography weaving together the layered influences that shape the artist's world.
A piñata dragon rendered in the spirit of Quetzalcoatl honors a younger brother born in the Year of the Dragon. Beside it, the artist depicts herself as a piñata goat — a nod to her Capricorn sign and the steadfast resilience she identifies with, bridging Chinese and Latin symbolism. A nod to the historical ties of tissue paper (papel de chino) being introduced and adopted by Latin America to produce papel picado and piñatas.
A diptych of oval canvases portrays a sister alongside a rooster, their profiles turned away from one another in quiet tension — a pairing that challenges female gender norms while celebrating stubborn strength. A triptych centers a youngest brother as a boar, flanked by a sun with a cactus in fruit and a moon beside flowering nopales, grounding him between light and shadow. Finally, a portrait of the artist's parents glows in deep orange and blue, their figures emerging from an elaborate stained glass composition of a rooster, chicken, oranges, and leaves — the sacred and the domestic intertwined.
Together, Sacred Conversations weaves personal mythology, cultural heritage, and family portraiture into a unified meditation on identity, belonging, and the rituals that carry us forward.