Segundo Piso/Second Story (2022)

Segundo Piso continues my ongoing research into the ways architecture—from the scale of a living room to a city—relates to memory, destabilization, and belonging.

The exhibition builds upon my 2021 installation, Cuarto de Estar, which focused on my paternal grandparents’ home—built in Colonia Anzures in Mexico City. This installation incorporates images from my parents’ Mexico City apartment and the house in Pittsburgh where my family settled in the 1980s.

Each element of the installation evokes experiences in these family dwellings: my parents’ living room flooded with light, my twin sister climbing a staircase reflected in a vanity mirror, my father perched on a sofa.

Segundo Piso’s material strategies use the functions of memory to reveal the layered concept of home in diasporic communities.

Exhibited at Chicago Artists Coalition as part of a BOLT Artist in Residency, with support from the Illinois Arts Council and an Individual Artists Program Grant from the City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs & Special Events.

Fabrication of steel bases by Dan Gulick, MDF boards cut by Erik Petersen, installation photography by Ryan Edmund Theil.