Carlos Rosales-Silva: Mariposa

Reflecting on his recent visit to Santuario Piedra Herrada—one of the final stops in the monarch butterfly migration—Rosales-Silva says, “These monarchs travel from Canada to Mexico every year, a journey that has been turned into a symbol for labor stream migration of Mexican immigrants and mythologized as a migration of souls of departed loved ones. To witness the butterflies on the top of this mountain is an intense spectacle, transportive and awe inspiring.”

Taking this experience as inspiration for the title, Rosales-Silva’s collective work in the exhibition includes a commissioned site-specific mural and smaller more intimate paintings. Both playful and politically charged, the works contain deeply rich colors and a variety of materials creating a dense texture—from crushed stone to glass beads, mixed into acrylic paint—that make reference to adobe architecture, Chicano Muralists, and common border city building materials, like concrete and stucco.

In Mariposa, color, texture, and geometry becomes strategies of visibility, inviting the viewers into a landscape shaped by hybridity and migration. “I often think of my paintings as an ongoing research project of visual citation,” says the artist. “For me, a critical engagement with modern and contemporary painting is a way to cite influences by Indigenous cultures that have remained uncited and used as raw material.”