Ariana Gomez: My Mother Speaks of Land as Memory

April 11, 2025 - July 6, 2025
Opening Party: Friday, April 11th, 6pm-9pm
ON VIEW: Tuesdays-Thursdays, 3pm-6pm
Fridays, 12pm-7pm
Saturdays, 11am-4pm

Using photography, film, and sound Ariana Gomez works within installation to understand the link between identity, land, home, and memory to create a living archive of her family’s history. Her interest lies in the intersections of these mediums and how they work together to create an experiential memory-scape of place. Her current project My Mother Speaks of Land as Memory was born through loss – lost land, lost identity, and the loss of past and future selves for her father, her mother, and herself.  

Her father’s death led her to a questioning of ownership, legacy, and identity. Who gets to have an archive? How does one create an archive after so many missed years? How does one make a person-less portrait? She began personifying her father within the Texas landscape, their shared home. While searching for him in this arid earth, she found her mother, an immigrant by way of Puerto Rico, who felt unmoored in this vast sea of desert. Through her father and her, she became embedded in this foreign landscape, losing ties to her own history and grasping at the loose ends of her identity. 

Her practice seeks to engage in dialogue about who owns history and identities, and who must create shared diasporic experiences simply to survive in the world. Her mother, her father and herself span three separate existences across time that coalesce in the shared memory of reconciliation and understanding. Grief is universal, but her experience through generational migration, and distorted memory is crucial to connecting with those who understand and mourn the generational ties to a land, now long forgotten. She intends to pull from long histories to fight for her own experience of place, her mother’s threatened landscape, and her father’s forgotten sense of identity, tied to a homeland now known only as myth.

FLATS programming is sponsored by Fresh Arts and is funded in part by the City of Houston through Houston Arts Alliance