● ● ● Selected Projects

01 Tolthis Kime ayaw tocnam : La historia del tiempo sin nombre

This work is now on view on Parent Company Gallery in NYC untill January 16 2027 .

2026

[Sin título — Aycalquibuild, Ayamapaperwork]

Melted pennies, dimes, and Mexican pesos. 35 mm diameter. Edition of 5 + 2 AP. 2026.

Between January and June 2026, a body without legal status walked the streets of New York collecting coins from the asphalt. Twenty-six coins. Two dollars. The first month's studio rent cost nine hundred.

The math held its own conclusion. The body stopped there, noted the GPS coordinates of each coin, and kept the evidence.

Those pennies and dimes — discarded change from the city that needed the labor and refused the laborer — were melted together with Mexican ten-peso coins saved through formal, documented work before emigrating. Two monetary sovereignties, two labor regimes, one crucible. What comes out of the mold belongs to neither state.

The alloy is copper, zinc, and nickel. The same cheap metals that the U.S. and Mexican governments introduced in 1965, 1982, and 1996 precisely to empty their coins of intrinsic value. The Nemon coin inverts that logic: it restores material weight not with precious metal, but with the accumulated labor of a body the system chose not to count.

There was no studio. No papers. No recognition. What there was, was time — nameless time, time that didn't count. And the certainty that time, accumulated, would be enough to invent a world.

Aycalquibuild. Ayamapaperwork. Already enough.

02 Contemporary Archives of Human Displacement

This body of work is previously unexhibited and available for premiere.

2025-ongoing

This series began in a workshop with children of migrant origin, in collaboration with the Mexican Coalition in New York. Together we reimagined Speedy Gonzales — a pop-culture figure burdened with stereotypes of Mexican identity — turning him into an emblem of resistance, belonging, and imagination. Their drawings are the origin and the substance of every work here.

I embroider those drawings in wool onto worn agricultural sacks that once carried potatoes, beans, and sugar from the United States to Mexico, printed with the graphics of American companies. The sacks hold a double trajectory: goods likely harvested by migrant labor, shipped south for consumption and trade. Embroidery is slow. It interlaces the children's images with the coarse surface until voices, labor, and displacement accumulate in the same object.

At first the works read as playful. Underneath sits a denser constellation — the crossing of bodies, the circulation of goods, the fragile construction of identity. They function less as finished objects than as sensitive documents: a living archive of displacement, continually negotiated and reinvented.

A percentage of every sale returns to the Mexican Coalition's children's art program — materials, museum visits, continued workshops. The collaboration does not end when the work leaves the studio.

ITZEL

2025

Hand-dyed wool yarn with natural pigments on jute sack

35.43× 43.31 × 1.96 in

GAEL

2025

Hand-dyed wool yarn with natural pigments on jute sack

27.55 × 35.43 × 1.96 in

Frijol Pinto (Pinto Bean)

2025

Hand-dyed wool yarn with natural pigments on jute sack

27.55 × 35.43 × 1.96 in

GERALDINE

2025

Hand-dyed wool yarn with natural pigments on jute sack

35.43× 43.31 × 1.96 in

ARANZA Y GRISELDA
2025
Hand-dyed wool yarn wit h natural pigments on jute sack

35.43 x 43.31 x 1.96 in

Detail

Detail

Detail

Detail

Detail

Documentation Process

Documentation Process

02 CHICLERO

This body of work is previously unexhibited and available for premiere.

2023-2024

In Chiclero, Manuel Gaona enters the jungle of Quintana Roo not to portray a cultural tradition, but to confront a territory shaped by extraction, labor, and precarious survival. The work emerges from a sustained process of listening, witnessing, and learning alongside a community whose knowledge is transmitted through embodied practices—cutting, climbing, bleeding, improvising.

Gaona rejects romanticization focusing on the material realities of a trade historically marked by risk and exploitation. Machetes, ropes, resin, and gum carry traces of exhaustion and dignity, becoming evidence rather than symbols: testimonies of a landscape where bodies, trees, and economies are equally under pressure.

Acknowledging his position as an outsider, Gaona approaches the jungle through collaboration and restraint, allowing the territory to determine the limits of the encounter. Chiclero examines the cost of resilience itself, revealing the fragility of an equilibrium that is ecological, economic, and human.

Peligro de extinción

2023-ongoing

Jute sack; funerary beeswax candle from Dzula; wood.

Approx.

55.12 × 23.62 × 11.81

Detail

Detail

El machete de don Antonio. la cuerda de Yonny, un zapote y mi intrusión en la selva

2023-2024

Chiclero’s machete; henequén rope; chiclero’s blood; sapodilla trunk; concrete; gravel.

29.53 × 47.24 × 19.69 in

Detail

Lenguaje Propio

2023-2024

Linen on mahogany stretcher; sapodilla resin; natural pigment.

14.76 × 18.31 in

Detail

Uso de suelo

2023-2024

Mahogany wood illegally extracted from the municipality of Dzula.

31.50 × 19.69 × 1.97 in

Detail

El túper de mi lunch

2023–2024

Jute stretcher, sapodilla resin, acrylic paint, chicle block

15 3/4 × 23 5/8 × 4 in

Detail

La ilusión de Marcos / El chicle / La ilusión de Don Antonio

2023–2024

Triptych.

Henequen mounted on mahogany stretcher, sapote resin, and acrylic paint.

51.2 × 35.4 in each

Studio shot.

Detail

Buscando el Oro blanco encontré a Dios

2023-2024

White chewing gum; labin wood; wooden beam.

50.3× 12.9× 6.6 in

Detail

Detail

Process Documentation

Process Documentation

Process Documentation

Process Documentation

Process Documentation

Process Documentation

Process Documentation

Process Documentation

03 Happy Meal Project

2025-ongoing

The gesture is minimal: share a Happy Meal with a migrant. Within that ordinary act — hospitality and consumption, childhood and displacement, foreignness and belonging — a brief pause opens inside a journey shaped by precarity.

The box is what remains. After each encounter it is kept and inscribed with the participant's first name only. When a photograph is taken — and not every encounter includes one — the box covers the face. Anonymity is built into the image, not applied to it.

The project is open. Anyone can perform the gesture and contribute a box, wherever they are. As the archive grows, the boxes are periodically reassembled and exhibited as evolving installations: a dispersed monument to migration and everyday hospitality, expanding with every encounter.

The boxes are not sold individually. The archive is indivisible: it may enter a public collection intact, but it will not be dispersed through the market.

Image 1

Image 2

Image 3

Image 4

Image 6

04 80,000 dias de ilusiones y sueños rotos .

Presented only in France .

2018

We all have dreams. Few are able to fulfill them. What sustains us is illusion — that quiet, persistent flicker of hope that casts light even on the darkest days. Success is not measured in numbers, but in moments that endure.

80,000 Days is a meditation on longing, devotion, and the quiet resilience of those who have given their lives to the bull — and continue to do so long after the spotlight has faded.

The title marks a collective passage of time: 80,000 days, the sum of four lives bound to Tauromaquia. Each entered the world of bullfighting decades ago; each still inhabits its orbit. One teaches children at the municipal bullfighting school of Aguascalientes. Another forges swords and ayudados by hand. A third produces banderillas and taurine handicrafts. The fourth assists sword handlers behind the ring. None of them became a matador.

Over two years I worked alongside them, not as an outsider but as a fellow initiate — having lived the intensity of the arena as a torero myself. For the photographs that became these lithographs, I dressed each man in my own traje de lucesand my own equipment. The gesture is the work: clothing that carried me into the ring was lent to the men who never entered it. What the camera registers is not costume but transfer — a life's proximity to a dream, finally worn.

The series builds a bridge between two distant traditions: Tauromaquia and contemporary art. It does not illustrate the spectacle. It attends to its unseen rituals, the afterlives of desire, the textures of memory that linger in every gesture.

Lithography is where this becomes material. Stone, ink, and acid work not as reproduction but as poetic excavation: each print holds the trace of time, the pressure of memory, the persistence of a dream that refuses to disappear.

The project was shown in Nîmes — one of the most important bullfighting cities in the world — and it was, in 2019, during France's principal feria taurina

21,900

23,360

12,110+22,630

El Tijuano.

El Punteño.

La Changuita.

El Tuco .

01 Project Name

Vivamus sed sapien
March 2047

Praesent bibendum a elit non efficitur. Etiam et velit vitae quam aliquet fermentum. Quisque sit amet nulla dictum, cursus erat a, tempus est. Sed laoreet, magna eget mattis tincidunt.

Image 1

Image 2

Image 3

Image 4

Image 5

Image 6

Image 7

Image 8

01 Project Name

Vivamus sed sapien
March 2047

Praesent bibendum a elit non efficitur. Etiam et velit vitae quam aliquet fermentum. Quisque sit amet nulla dictum, cursus erat a, tempus est. Sed laoreet, magna eget mattis tincidunt.

Image 1

Image 2

Image 3

Image 4

Image 5

Image 6

Image 7

Image 8