Menagerie of DREAMers
Format: Solo exhibition
Year: 2025
Materials: Wood and 3d printed models
Location : Rainosek gallery at University of New Mexico School of Architecture + Planning in Albuquerque, NM
Credits: Carlos Sabogal García + Alaa Quraishi
Menagerie of DREAMers is an immigration sculptural installation that examines the DACA experience through a series of morphed bedrooms. Each room centers a set of artifacts shifting into a dream-like state, building a layered story. Visitors read the rooms through drawing-devices that construct narratives and reveal the structural conditions shaping a DREAMer’s daily life.
The first intersection is lamp + health. The typology is a small attic bedroom — stuffy, out of the way. The light fixture carves out the hardships of healthcare access in an already difficult system. Access is blocked, and health suffers repeatedly. The lamp becomes an artifact of that discomfort.
The second intersection is bed + mental health. This larger room with a bay window holds the intimacy of a shared space. The bed bursts with the weight of insomnia, anxiety, and blocked access to mental healthcare. The barriers are immense, and background worries project into the room as larger than life.
The third intersection is chair + education. This dorm room typology looks at DREAMers in high school and college. The chairs as artifacts project what access looks like — loans, admissions, and the question of whether pursuing higher education is worth the cost and risk.
The fourth intersection is storage + economy. This basement bedroom is the space of the resourceful entrepreneur. Shelves and nightstands carve out the advantages and disadvantages of building a small business under constrained legal status.
Each typology unfolds through carving, addition, and etching — materialized on 9″ × 16″ white museum board cut with a laser cutter. Together, these four bedrooms and their morphed artifacts construct a shared, layered storytelling of precarious voices. The beauty, sadness, loss, and unease of that precarity are etched into spaces that feel familiar and distorted at once.