Altar de la Recámara: Mujer, Ollin, Memory, 2025

Altar de la Recámara: Mujer, Ollin, Memory is part of Madre_Land: South Texas Memory & the Art of Making Home, curated by Bonnie Ilza Cisneros at Centro de Artes in San Antonio. The exhibition centers rooms of Mexican American homes as sites of intergenerational exploration by 27 South Texas artists, examining themes of family, biculturalism, food, heirlooms, local businesses, spirituality, religion, and remembrance.

This work begins with the familiar form of the vanity table, an object deeply entangled with histories of gender, consumption, and colonial order. Often reduced to a site of self-scrutiny and commodified beauty, the vanity carries the weight of surveillance and discipline. Yet, in this piece, the vanity is reimagined as something more enduring—an ancient presence, akin to an old mountain or weathered tree, that holds witness across time.

It transforms from an inanimate object and colonial tool into a being that insists on slowness, care, and continuity. Within this transformation, the vanity becomes a site of resistance to capitalism’s relentless theft of time. Here, adornment is not superficial ornament but preparation: a practice of equipping the self to move through a world that seeks homogenization under the forces of authoritarianism.

The table is both a place of vulnerability and of power. To sit before it is to submit to the gaze of the mirror, but also to claim the right to be seen. The piece asks the viewer to inhabit this tension. One must be willing to watch from the position of the vanity, and equally willing to be watched from the other side. In this doubled exchange, the vanity ceases to be merely furniture—it becomes an altar of reciprocity, where adornment, resistance, and visibility converge.