February 8 - 11th, 2024

Swivel Gallery 

​

This three person presentation of works by Mexico City-based María Conejo, Guadalajara-based artist Alejandro García Contreras, and Puerto Rican-born, Chicago-based Isabella Mellado brings together a powerful ensemble of primordial energies, ancestral symbologies and alternative spiritualities.

Indefinitely haunted or possibly enchanted, these works embrace a similar contemporary esotericism that strives to answer the mysteries of the Universe. Between life and death, fire and water, these artists’ work calls attention to the interconnectivity weaving individual bodies and universal energies.

“We can predict the future,” Carl Jung stated, “when we know how the present moment evolved from the past.” According to Jung, the evolution of the present is linked to the past, just as the conscious mind is subjected to the unconscious. Recurring symbols and archetypes throughout different cultures are a visible manifestation of this connection and synchronicity that forces timeless existential truths of human nature and psyche to rise to come to light.

​

Working with the magically-charged medium of the Tarot, Isabella Mellado explores universal elements of the human condition and experience, embracing this restless attraction for the unknown that finds solace in ancient divine archetypes, rooted in collective consciousness. In her practice, she scavenges the depths of occultism, myths, and ancient rituals, staging each of her paintings with sets, props, costumes, and herself as the subject. She invokes a lived experience through her works while also using the means of technology intertwining the use of photography