Menagerie of DREAMers

The “menagerie of DREAMers” exhibit looks to the experience of DACA* recipients through a series of bedrooms. Each bedroom centers a set of artifacts morphing into a dream like state, telling a story. The rooms are viewed through drawing-devices, building up stories and breaking down the conditions of a DREAMer**.
There are four intersections these bedrooms explore. The first is lamp + health. The typology is a small attic bedroom, somewhere stuffy and out of the way. The light fixture carves out the hardships of access to healthcare, in an already tedious system- access is blocked and health is affected over and over again. The lamp as an artifact that informs us of this discomfort. The second is bed + mental health. The bedroom here is a typology of a larger room with a bay window, one occupied with a partner. The bed as an artifact bursts with the discomfort of insomnia, anxiety, and access to mental
healthcare.
The barriers are immense, and the background worries seem to project in the space as larger than life.The third is chair + education. This typological dorm room looks at students in high school and college, and the chairs as an artifact project
information on what access looks like, loans look like, and admissions look like, especially if it is even worth it to pursue higher education. The fourth is storage + economy. This basement “garden level” bedroom is Above is an exploded annotated diagram of the interior of the bed + mental health bedroom, giving us a better idea of how the
morphology emits from a given artifact and morphs the bedroom itself through carving, addition, and etching. 9” x 16” white museum board etched with laser cutter
that of a strappy entrepenuer. The shelves and nightstands as artifacts start to carve out what advantages or disadvantages one might have when building their small businesses. These four bedroom typologies and the artifacts that morph
them dive into a layered, shared storytelling of precarious voices. The beauty, sadness, loss, and general uneasiness are etched into these seemingly familiar, morphed spaces.
*DACA stands for deferred Action Childhood Arrival, representing a population of childrem that traveled to the US and overstayed, those who are DACA recipients recieve a temporary, renewable legal status that is highly constrained.