darner and door stop, ordinary

Art Works Downtown, San Rafael, CA | March 2019

Objects have power, they can go through transubstantiation. They continue to be utilitarian every day objects but they also are imbued with the power of memory. They hold on their surface the fingerprints and intentions of the object maker.

The Darner and the Doorstop represent my past, my inheritance. The original wood and metal objects were created by my maternal grandfather while he worked as a mechanic at the National Distillery of Costa Rica. I took these objects, created molds of them and cast them in materials that recalled my families past. To bring to light their origins I cast them in amber colored resins that I tinted to resemble the different spirits the distillery produced. I also cast them in sugar—which is a core ingredient in the making of rum. For the “Ordinary” show I used them in a performance where I ate them (this iteration was made of gelatin) therefore ingesting my own history.