Temporary Spaces 
Mingei International Museum
San Diego, CA

Temporary Spaces installation conforms to 8 panels of loomed textiles dyed with indigo and needle felted technique illustrating clusters of butterflies. The exhibition is part of Blue Gold, PST, Art & Science Collide. Opens September 14, 2024. 

Temporary Spaces reflects on the monarch butterflies' migratory journey, and how this process compares to historic migration of indigenous people of the Americas. The monarchs' extensive journey spans three to four generations to complete their route from the northern United States and Canada south into Mexico. The first generation will spend time in Mexico, forging ancestral memories into their own cellular structures. The route is mapped within them and will guide the next generation home. 

They migrate so they can save their species, and they travel in communities, building temporary spaces and moving along freely, they represent the journey of the indigenous ancestors before colonization. Their migratory journeys were inscribed within their own generational code, spanning continents and millenia. Later, when lines were drawn and national boundaries were imposed upon them in their own lands, those ancestors experienced a profound disruption very much like a genetic mutation: they no longer traveled freely to areas that sustained their existence. They were held by borders that were not their own making and experienced a dis-ease at the most spiritual and cellular levels of their beings. So migration, mutation, adaptation, and transformation are always in constant play.