ESPAÑOL (Más información sobre la exposición)

Jackie Amézquita (b. 1985, Quetzaltenango, Guatemala) lives and works in Los Angeles. She is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice engages the ecological, ancestral, and cosmological dimensions of space, place, and temporality. For Amézquita, a site is a living constellation of human, elemental, and living systems—an evolving terrain where memory, matter, and energy circulate across deep time.  

Her work choreographs biomaterials as cosmological agents that carry ancestral knowledge across genealogies, informed by oral traditions rooted in Latin American epistemologies. Earth, charcoal, rainwater, masa, and limestone act as vessels of memory and transformation, mediating exchanges between volcanic depth, terrestrial surface, and atmospheric movement. Activated through mixing, compression, burning, washing, and dispersal, these materials function as ritual technologies that awaken and set matter into relation. 

As a Maker-in-Residence at Craft Contemporary, Amézquita invites visitors to act as curators – recreating the intimacy of studio visits and offering a first-hand experience of her artistic process. Using soil gathered from around the United States, she mixes the dirt with masa, cacao, spring water, and seals them with copal to form pebble-like sculptures coming from the palm of her hand. A new alchemy that combines natural materials, ancestral knowledge, and the physical imprint of humanity, Amézquita’s residency asks the audience to contribute to her project while displaying her method and materials. Her freezer and oven are key elements that help her freeze the soil until it’s ready to be used [stopping time] and then the oven bakes the soil to create the pebbles [activate it again through heat]. This process is inspired by the natural climate patterns and seasonal changes of Mother Earth that make life possible.   

A national Call for Soil on social media, which is part of Amézquita’s project at Craft Contemporary, is made in collaboration with the Art, Design & Architecture Museum at UC Santa Barbara and the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft.