Memories of a past life

Brenda Nuñez explores childhood memories of Mexico in her senior thesis project

Catherine Silvey / Feature Editor / The USD Vista

Last Thursday, senior visual arts student Brenda Nuñez presented her senior thesis project, “Sueños y Recuerdos,” (Dreams and Memories) an exhibit she created in the Visual Arts Center Gallery that was displayed throughout last week. Nuñez started her presentation by explaining where the idea and focus of her presentation emerged from and why this piece was so personal for her. 

“I knew I wanted to focus on one thing and that was my Mexican-American identity,” Nuñez said. “I wasn’t sure how it was going to go about it, but I knew I was going to make up my topic because of my initial idea to focus on things I was uncomfortable with and things that I took from Mexico.”

Nuñez cited a painting by Frida Kahlo as a source of inspiration for her art, noting that being caught between two identities can create a space of isolation she wished to capture in her exhibit.

“A piece of work that’s always stood out to me is a piece by Frida Kahlo titled ‘Self Portrait Along the Border Line Between Mexico and the United States,’” Nuñez said. “In this painting, she’s standing along the border and to the left you see Mexico, a beautiful place with colorful flowers and roots, and to the right we see the industrialized country of the United States. Though she was Mexican and from Mexico, I looked at this and related to it as a feeling of feeling stuck or unattached or displaced. So that’s definitely mine. I knew I needed to connect to that feeling.”

Nuñez expressed feeling simultaneously connected to and detached from Mexico, as she was born and lived there during the first years of her life. However, when she was four years old, her mother took Nuñez and her sisters and drove to California, to have a fresh start for their family in the United States. While she had not talked much with her mother about their past life in Mexico, Nuñez shared that her mother immediately opened up when Nuñez asked for her help with the project, sharing years of documents and photos.

“I decided to ask my mom questions,” Nuñez said. “To my surprise, she pulled out boxes and boxes of documents that she had kept for over 20 years. She had letters and emails and family photos and this wedding video that I had never seen before. When I look at them, it just makes me become aware of how badly my mom fought for our safety and how important our family is to her, that everything she’s told me in my life wasn’t made up and wasn’t exaggerated.”

It was with both these documents and her long-held feelings of discomfort surrounding her past that Nuñez set forth in creating her exhibit. The exhibit is centered around black and white photographs hung on the wall of a desert landscape resembling the terrain of the border.

“The images represent a feeling of isolation and you can’t really locate where they’re taken,” Nuñez said. “It looks like a border land, so you can’t tell if it’s here or in Mexico.”

Some of the photographs have scratches caused from the development process, creating a distortion in the final image. This was not intentional, and actually a mistake that almost led Nuñez to throw out the images. However, upon taking a second look at the photographs, Nuñez liked the way the scratches looked and felt that they gave the project new meaning. 

“The physical scratches in the photograph appear to make the image look like it’s fading or burning like a memory you can’t hold onto any longer,” Nuñez said. “The scratches also make the images appear like a dream, like a more surreal event. I also think that these images take an imaginative approach — I think they borrow concepts from magical realism. They take a realistic narrative — my life story — and combine it with these surreal images that I’ve also created of what I think Mexico looks like.”

In addition to the photographs, Nuñez created a two-minute video that was played on loop during the duration of the exhibit. The video spliced together clips from her parents’ wedding video with clips of a desert terrain.

“To me, it was a foreign and strange concept to see them together, so I thought it was important to showcase,” Nuñez said. “I combined them with clips of the desert that I took recently because I wanted to connect them to the images on the wall.”

Nuñez noted that the video was meant to capture the nature of a memory as a dream-like state.

“When my mother left Mexico, she told me she just kept driving and driving, even though I can’t remember the actual car ride,” Nuñez said. “When I think of it, I think it’s just like this never-ending landscape. It’s like you can never see the end of the road or get away from what you’re trying to get away from. So I cut these clips in the desert in and out, kind of in a way where they’re flashing back and forth like memories flash through your head.”

Another component of the exhibit was the inclusion of lit religious candles and colorful flowers to represent Nuñez’s Mexican heritage. Nuñez used real flowers in her exhibit to represent the effect of time on memories, tying them to the central theme of her presentation.

“I also chose to use real flowers because I wanted them to slowly wilt and fall off and fade and die, just like my memories have over time,” Nuñez said. “As badly as I want to contain these memories and keep them, like these flowers inside these boxes, they’ll still fade and change.”

Nuñez concluded her presentation by noting that the process of creating this exhibit made her ultimately more comfortable with and connected to her Mexican-American identity.

“‘Sueños y Recuerdos’ is a body of work that explores my Mexican-American identity, but also resurrects repressed memories,” Nuñez said. “Though I’m still not ready to return to Mexico, I’ve learned through this process the importance of my culture and the permanent, deep connection to it.”

The visual arts senior thesis exhibitions will continue throughout the rest of the semester, presented by the graduating majors. Each week a different senior turns the Visual Arts Center Gallery into a new exhibit. Thesis presentations take place on Thursdays at 12:30 p.m. in the Visual Arts Center Gallery in Sacred Heart Hall behind Camino.