Jack in The Box

2026

This site-specific body of work centers on a Jack in the Box that holds a significant place in my family’s migration story. It was here that coyotes dropped off my aunt after her journey to the United States, and where I first saw her following her arrival. Years later, participating in a summer exhibition at the gallery next door brought me back to this location as a site of both personal memory and artistic inquiry.

Across sculpture and digital renderings, I reimagine the restaurant through the visual language of Catholic devotion. Catholicism is central to my family’s belief system, while its role in the colonization of the Americas complicates that inheritance. The work holds these histories together, transforming a familiar commercial space into a place of reverence, uncertainty, and remembrance. It also responds to the fear surrounding ICE raids in Los Angeles and the withdrawal from everyday public spaces that this fear produces.

In Jack, the restaurant’s architecture takes on the qualities of a church. Colored Mylar and candlelight evoke stained glass, merging the building’s recognizable form with an imagined sacred architecture. This transformation gives physical expression to the significance an otherwise ordinary fast-food restaurant holds for my family.

Jack in the Box Bag extends this gesture through a handmade paper bag. A cutout of the restaurant’s logo, inverted and covered with colored Mylar, allows light from modified tea lights to shine through. Somewhere between a jack-o’-lantern and a candle used in a religious vigil, the bag turns disposable packaging into an object of contemplation. The inverted logo unsettles its familiar identity as a commercial symbol.

Two digital renderings, printed on vinyl banners, return to the exact location of my aunt’s arrival. Built in Blender using satellite imagery as ground texture, these environments place a reconstruction of the restaurant within a crystalline landscape of buildings. Separate facade and profile views approach the site through the conventions of architectural representation while allowing its surroundings to become unfamiliar.

Together, these works consider how migration and family memory give ordinary places a significance that exceeds their intended use.