Awakening in Transit: A Broken Fairytale
creations of entropy
Dark surreal fairytales unravel migration and identity, where bodies in transit move through worlds that were never made for them.
Fairytale Fractures
Drawing from fairytales, mythology, and theatrical staging, my work examines migration and identity as lived and inherited conditions. Figures appear suspended between worlds. They are caught in systems of belonging that echo both childhood narratives and contemporary realities. Through dark surreal imagery, I question who is allowed to arrive, who remains in transit, and how these boundaries are constructed.
Staged Worlds
In opera, narratives of power, desire, and identity are staged and repeated. These backdrops extend my practice into physical space. They are building environment where belonging is performed, enforced, and sometimes disrupted.
After the Crossing
At the opening, a woman stood in front of my painting and said, “I am the girl.” And she really was, just grown up with the same presence, the same energy. We talked for a bit, and it stayed with me. Thank you, Maribel.
“Immigrant Song” Exhibition at
Schelfhaudt Gallery, University of Bridgeport
After the crossing, the body does not arrive unchanged but becomes a site of layered memory, carrying what could not be left behind. Motherhood emerges as both inheritance and transformation. The mother acts as a vessel for histories, displacement, and imagined futures; like spores, these inheritances travel invisibly, taking root in new and uncertain grounds, so that migration becomes not only a physical passage but a biological and emotional one. It is embedded in the body, quietly transmitted, and continuously reshaped across generations.
Some are allowed to move freely while others are contained, monitored, and invisible. This work confronts the unequal realities of migration, environmental survival, and systemic violence by placing symbolic figures as La Catrina within contemporary structures of control, including detention spaces, while also referencing the lived conditions of communities shaped by restricted access to safely, clean air and protection from violence, together theses systems reveal how breath, movement and survival are unevenly distributed considered “normal life” is in fact regulated by power and exposure to risk.
What remains in Transit is never still
The following traces a practice moving between image, space, and community - shaped by migration, constructed worlds, and the question of who is allowed to belong.
