THE GARDEN WITHOUT STRANGERS, 2024. Permanently installed at the UW Health Eastpark Medical Center in Madison, Wisconsin, which will specialize in adult cancer care and women's complex care. Serving as a connecting point between the two wings of the building, the sculpture is a symbol of empathy among strangers who have shared, often difficult, experiences. In the sculpture, seven colorful sculptural shapes that take inspiration from textile patterns together form a four-season garden that is active and vibrant even during a long winter. Patients, staff, and visitors at the medical center will be able to walk around a path through The Garden Without Strangers or to look at the sculpture from inside all of the courtyard facing windows.
QUILT, 2022. On view at the Rochester Institute of Technology as part of the Anna Ballarian Visiting Artist Series.
SHIFTING FOUNDATIONS, 2023. This vibrantly painted sculpture suggests the idea of a home undergoing change, with its construction-orange color, crisscrossing scaffolding, and missing sections. While inside the museum a series of paintings focuses on people in interior “home” spaces, the sculpture talks about “home” from an exterior perspective and highlights how housing is becoming increasingly more difficult for people to obtain.
There are many reasons for the shortage of affordable housing, including limited land availability, not enough houses being built, population growth, and a lack of affordable housing investment. Although the lack of affordable homes is increasing, there are also many vacant homes including abandoned homes and luxury investment properties. Taking inspiration from the map-like design on the sculpture, how can we plan housing and work together to ensure everyone has a good home? When there's no ceiling, how can we complete our collective global home to build a roof over all of our heads?
On view at the Springfield Museum of Art, Ohio.
ANATOMIES FROM ARCHITECTURES, 2024. While passing through the Ante-Purgatory, Dante hears the following words from one of the souls: “Whoever you are, walking as you go, turn your face towards me and try to remember if you have ever seen me in the world.” These words could act as a summary for this installation, since the 500 photographs that form it portray people who do not exist in real life and who, instead, were generated by a computer.
In general, the image generation process has two phases. The first is the training process, where millions of images of real people (mostly taken from selfies sent by social media users) guide the optimization of a learning model and its architecture. The second phase is the generation process itself, where random noise is converted by the trained model into the image of a human being. The images used during the training stage, those that belonged to real people, then become like shadows of the people they represent—shadows that are now confined to living in the memory of a server or a computer to obey the whims of it and its users.
For the installation, Byron and García Trillos used a pre-trained application that allows you to specify text and other image prompts to guide the generation process. In choosing their prompts, they sought to create a wide variety of selfie-like images exploring specific color patterns, different photographic and light qualities, different time periods and locations, different climatic conditions, and most importantly, images that tell diverse stories from a wide variety of “people.” In this network of sometimes seemingly familiar faces, they are both in conversation with each other and simultaneously disconnected from one another.
However, the issue of the generation of human beings in this installation goes beyond the simple generation of images, and in particular, the installation seeks to draw attention to the freedom with which these new technological platforms can use personal data for purposes with harmful societal consequences.
QUILT, 2021. In a quilt many different parts, each with its own story, come together to form a complex system, much like how we are all intricately connected to each other and to the natural environment. If one part of the quilt is removed, the pattern becomes unbalanced. In this sculpture, each square section or quilt block is unique, varying in depth, pattern, and color, but combined the larger quilt pattern becomes even more unique.
Quilting is a traditional practice that can be found throughout the world, in textile form and also in other formats such as painted on barn exteriors throughout the US. Handmade patchwork quilts are strongly linked to ideas surrounding warmth, memory, home, and the cycle of life. Quilts are also symbolic of creativity through resourcefulness as pieces of the quilt are often made from scraps of no longer useful fabrics or clothes. In this sculpture, for example, Quilt is made in part from wood that was repurposed from the support frame of a previous sculpture, and cut at different lengths and depths to form an interlocking arrangement.