My MFA thesis project used the novel The Circuit, by Francisco Jiménez, as a reference, thinking about the life of migration and my family history. Cardboard, packing materials, chicken wire, and magazine collage came together to recreate the skins and textures of buildings in East Los Angeles, where I currently reside.

I have dreams where I navigate a familiar scene of obstacles and crumbling buildings. I’m in what seems to be a middle school or high school hallway with gray dented lockers with obvious paint patches covering the unwanted vandalism. In other dreams, I’m gallivanting through the streets of an unknown bustling city that I can never recognize. It’s a virtual world within my own brain.

I, then, used cardboard, packing materials, marker, and magazine collage to recreate buildings derived from the phenomenon of a discarded experience. Daily, I maneuver the East Los Angeles neighborhood Boyle Heights that symbolizes and compares the strength and resilience of the Mexican American community in my hometown San Jose, CA. These structures represent unconventional spaces of communion that, for the most part, have been used as a haven for those looking to escape the internal turmoil.

My solution for displaying the cardboard sculptures, contrary to the conventional white cubic pedestal, was to spray paint tomato cages and flip them (stakes pointing towards the ceiling) to serve as a visual analogy concerning the unstable and insecure infrastructure affecting the communities where I tend to ground myself. The conceptual decision for the flipped tomato cages was to point towards the agricultural practices born from necessity.