25 x 35 inches

In this piece, I’m layering different histories, including personal, natural, and shared histories of Texans, using the interstate highway system, laminated plants, warm colors, and transferred shapes of graffiti and tar squiggles on Texas roads to represent histories.

Texas is a home that many share, and it holds so many memories, just as my home at UT has not been mine alone, but that of many. I’ve come to think of my dorm room as my own, though I know it also belongs to my roommate, just as it also belonged to many other pairs. This room holds memories of mine and countless others, of which only the room itself will know all of. It’s funny that I can be homesick when I broaden my idea of home from San Antonio to all of Texas, but that’s because it’s all about the people I interact with that make a place home, which UT is slowly becoming more of for me. 

Considering Texas to be my home, I think of our state’s natural environment, and how we choose to think about it. Nature becomes a place of travel, in-between, and select visits, because while it surrounds us, we think of our daily lives as activities to do, mainly within buildings, such as “dorm–dining hall–library–gym–dorm–art building,” and thinking of life by buildings separates us from nature, causing us to think that we are outside of, unaffected and untouched by the natural world because of our technology. This is not right, because our urban lifestyles, full of comforts that make us think of nature as something only to use and dominate, causes climate change, which already affects us in negative ways, and will be our downfall if not attended to immediately and completely. We’re the only creatures who impede their own chances of survival, and as we manipulate and alter nature for our own comfort, we damage the ability of our planet, our home, to provide what we need to live healthy lives. 

Paving roads on top of nature is a form of domination, and also part of the way in which we separate ourselves from it, as roads are used for more comfortable passage through nature, separated from it by air-conditioned vehicles for shortened amounts of time as we travel from city to city. We’re separated from the natural world by physical barriers, yet windows also allow the light and the beauty of nature minus all of its inconveniences (heat, bugs, scratchy plants…) to come through to us. When I think of traveling for long periods of time in a car, one of the first things that comes to mind is vibrant sunsets, glowing orange and becoming more beautiful the closer they come to ending. Though I read or play games on my phone for a good amount of time during car rides, evenings I always spend immersed in color, trying to detect the subtle changes in the sky.

I wanted to fit the themes of separation and unity (of the beauty of the natural world that we all admire while still calling ourselves separate) into this piece by incorporating a map of the Texas highway systems in clear laminate as a way to break up the ground into multiple windows, through all of which, sunset-colored light can be projected, unifying the broken space representative of our mindset of separation from nature. Inside the windows, I’ve traced floor plans from my homes across Texas, including my house and neighborhood in SA, and my dorm in Austin, its floor plan so plain and uniform, but making up the rooms in which so many unknown personal memories have been made. My room is just one square among others, yet it is now a home. 

The background is a web that shows the passing of time and our shared and unknown personal histories, made up of traced photos of tar snakes on Texas roads that many have traveled, all carrying out different plans and on different journeys, and photos of unidentifiable graffiti words from around Austin, which every person could interpret in a different way. 

An example of unique interpretation is that of a small scrawly blob of red spray paint on a street light near my house in SA that my mom and I call “The Kiss” because its shape kind of looks like a lady’s red puckered lips. Everytime we drove by the graffiti on the way home, I looked at the blob and saw it as something fun, which I associated with home and love, thinking of the art as if it was blowing me a kiss every time I passed by. I had thought this for years before I pointed it out to my mom one day. She didn’t see what I meant at first, and we had to drive by again for her to be able to transform what she saw as a meaningless red blob into The Kiss. Now, my mom and I blow each other a kiss anytime we take that way home, passing by a scribble whose true meaning I’ll never know, but which now means home and my mom’s love to me. 

From SA’s suburbs to downtown Austin, the collage elements from SA are the pictures of tar snakes I’ve taken, and from Austin, its graffiti. The web of these shapes, made of laminated Texas plants, shows both the contrast of man-made things such as the repair of roads with tar and graffiti art vs. nature, and how they meld together in the sunset light of Texas, when we think of the whole as home.