- By Felix Suazo
No one chooses where they are born, but this happenstance marks their memories wherever they choose to live. Miami is populated by people from everywhere, whether from the United States or abroad. Yet, traces of origin eventually resurface. Two art projects presented in exhibition spaces throughout the city reveal the powerful force of memories and how they define the journeys of their creators.
In the solo exhibition Everything I Forgot?, Lisu Vega (b. Miami, 1980) explores her childhood and family memories, blending her artistic roots in experimental printmaking, textile techniques, and image sublimation. The project, presented at Edges Zone in September 2024, included textile installations with photographic interventions that reconstruct scenes linked to the artist’s early biography. For Vega, memory is a volatile entity that tends to fade. Faces and places blur, much like the sublimated images embedded in the fibers of her textile works. The exhibition is accompanied by short phrases and a text by semiologist Víctor Fuenmayor, a deep connoisseur of the artist’s work since her beginnings in Maracaibo, Venezuela, where she spent her childhood and trained. The recovered memory takes on the appearance of amorphous bodies and surfaces, expanding like a spider web or, perhaps, like the buried roots of plants that offer shade.
“A Geological Survey” Photographic Exhibition by Rose Marie Cromwell (b. 1983, Sacramento; based in Miami), ICA Miami, Design District, April – November 2024, reflects on identity, maturity, and family relationships. The project emerged from the artist’s journey across the American West with her mother and young daughter. The images confront the region’s complex history and the vast artistic legacy of its landscapes.
One photograph of a car’s rearview mirror seems to recapture the shared, foundational time in the artist’s life and that of her two companions, three generations connected to the native land, sharing sleep rituals, bathing, and eating among the rocks and vegetation. The arrangement of works in the space enhances the sense of journey and shared moments. Printed in various formats and arranged irregularly, the artist presents a landscape of fleeting glimpses that unite the past with future expectations in a transient present.
Just as no one chooses where they are born, no one can live without memories. Memory is what shapes and gives meaning to human experience, even in a city looking to the future as if the past had never existed. Yet beneath the sand and mud of promising Miami lie many entangled memories, including those of natives and newcomers who find rest here.
