[photos courtesy of Crza]

From Sarah Dougherty [Spacial Reconstruction: City of Mexico creator]:

The City of Mexico at Found Gallery was an experiment. The installation’s premise was to build a home reflecting the one filled with art and friendships and love I built in Mexico. As I and my brother, then best friend, and finally my boyfriend inhabited the space with me as we worked in it, the place became meaningful and became a home. When I went to Mexico I similarly created a home out of a few necessary suitcase items, local tiny flora, cheap imported plastic items, gifts, etc. To create the physical space we painted the backgrounds with meaningful colors- the deepest yellow and blue came together at the back wall in a polluted looking off-white, imperfect and rich, which became the “gallery” wall, a portion of the room that featured prints from the year in mexico. I tried to let the gallery and location also limit and therefore be creative shaping forces behind the exhibit, since it was about bricolage- making do with what’s around.

The task of creating an installation based on my Mexico paintings and experience in five days was daunting because I enjoy the quality of things with hand-work, how the more an object is touched and the more human energy poured into its physical self creates greater spiritual, aesthetic and emotional value. It was with the energy of people helping- Chris Cruse, my brother David, then Susie and then Josh- that the place really became a living painting and performance space. I think it was important for viewers to know that first, we were really living there and second, that we had five days to transform a somewhat more reserved and blank gallery space into a time capsule of my Mexican memories and a home. It speaks to the art of everyday living, practiced by transmigrants all the time, who become experts in temporary housing that they fill with objects that are placed in certain ways for aesthetic value and identity, but also as trophies and tributes to memories that are permanent in spite of frequent physical displacement.

The opening weekend was off to a slow start, as finishing touches and living necessities kept on beyond the noon deadline. When I realized that that itself was part of the walk-in exhibit and I let happenstance and daily life invade the prior aesthetic plan. the piece fell whole. Particularly joyful was when I gave tours to guests. At that point the intrinsic and added meaning of every object and photo in the place became a live, vibrant diary and journal to my stay in Mexico and the people that stayed with me there. Furthermore an impromptu reading of letters during a video viewing of videos made by us and by people about us turned into the most emotionally moving part of the weekend- where viewers that had been there for most of the installation’s building and opening heard letters I wrote to my friend chris last year read aloud while a movie I made to accompany them played. In the letter was the key concept behind a main painting I made there and recreated in mural form in the back bedroom- that even though it’s hard to balance all of the variables in relationships and in life- we keep trying, because to stop is to be a coward. And a home becomes a home when imbued with these relationships, and our strongest memories are marked by other people’s presence.

It felt difficult to not be able to explain all of this to everyone that walked in, but I’d be interested to hear how the rooms came across to people. In the future I would love to do a body of work/installation responding to Los Angeles itself, which kept creeping in in spite of the focus on last year in Mexico. It feels like the show was a closing of that chapter of my life, like a final display of my journals and growth that happened during that time. It was catharsis for processing my relationships, be them blood, or old friend, or new friend, or love.