Open First Thursday 5:00 pm - 7:00 pm
Artist Reception: Saturday, October 17th, 2026, 3:00 pm - 5:00 pm.
Please RSVP to info@pdxcontemporaryart.com
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Last year I had a dream. We were at my grandparents’ house and my late sister was standing there, looking at me. I carefully approached her and she whispered to me: “Soñé que revelabas”. I woke up trying to make sense of that sentence.
Revelar in Spanish is both to manifest or make public something that was a secret or unknown, and the chemical process in photography by which a latent image becomes visible.
She was my oldest sister, my best friend and confidant and had a gift to make me feel like things were going to work out. I wrote the sentence on a piece of paper and put it up on my studio wall. I saw it every day, and kept trying to figure out what she meant. As the days and the months went by, I realised that I am still trying to make sense of her loss. Loss not only as a consequence of death but loss in the quotidian. Loss of language, interactions, moments, and memories that become fainter as a result of distance and time. Leaving one’s home, family, and language and starting another life in a different country carries a weight that becomes most apparent during difficult times. I started looking through family pictures (my family and other families), using them as probes, copying them, changing them, creating new ones. I attached my own memories onto film.
This body of work is a personal account of the process of translation, not just in language, but of sounds, inflections, the stories, the memories, the dreams, and ultimately the way I see. The feeling of being unmoored. The estrangement that comes with the inability to fully translate from one language to the other. How does one communicate without full authority? How to experience in one’s language and express the memory in a different, foreign language. It is a reflection of ongoing investigations on translating my experiences from my native by language to my adopted one, back and forth in order to reconcile being in two different worlds with different structures; an attempt to create a personal visual language that can encompass both. A way to reveal myself.