Alma Entre Dos Mundos

March 22 – May 17, 2025

The spiritual realms of the border are difficult to capture, yet Aldo Cervantes and Amina Cruz seem to do just that. This exhibition brings their work into dialogue to investigate the charged energies embedded in the landscape both within and beyond the borderlands. Mountains, highways, and everyday objects replace the human body, lingering instead on loss, memory, and internal strife. Through their images, the artists ask us to consider how we remember those we’ve lost while balancing the act of healing—a process that is both personally and communally intimate.
By examining the border as a porous site of cultural and spiritual exchange, the artists evoke what scholar and cultural theorist Gloria Anzaldúa described as an “alien consciousness.” Born of her mestiza identity, the phrase identifies the feeling of belonging to multiple cultures, nations, and worlds at once. Constantly pulled in different directions, she articulates a new state of being: un alma entre dos mundos.

This exhibition—borrowing its title from Anzaldúa’s profound poetry—is an exploration of this bifurcated sentimentality, one the artists capture through their meticulous and distinct photographic practices. Both artists explore the act of crossing between worlds, echoing the migratory experience of crossing the U.S.–Mexico border.

Cervantes, who splits his time between San Diego and Tecate, Mexico, examines roadside altares and the ways communal memories are embedded within built and natural landscapes. Snapshots of family photographs and religious and cultural iconography extend his investigation into the spiritual practices that shape his everyday life between two nations. Cruz similarly resists confinement to a single environment.

Living and working in Los Angeles, her photographs from across California and Lima, Peru, are tinged with a supernatural heaviness intensified by cyanotype printing. The labor-intensive and intimate process produces darkened landscapes that convey the difficulty of moving between worlds and of navigating the internal borders of the mind. Together, the artists harness photography’s ability to reveal what the eye might miss: portals of exchange that emphasize hope and grief within an unpredictable, ever-changing landscape.