A Background

Sarah Isela Aguilar is a drawer born and raised in a red brick house with two badly pruned bushes at the end of the driveway. While looking out the window of a moving train, Sarah travels in a spiral that takes her in and out of tracing and retracing fragmentations of memory, place, and words in attempts of navigation on a tumbling surface. Received her BFA at The University of Texas at El Paso (2019) with a concentration in Drawing and minor in Printmaking and her MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago (2024).

Sarah Isela Aguilar currently lives and works in Chicago, but will always return to the star on the mountain.

A Statement

Por el techo can be translated from spanish to english as through the roof, by the roof, for the roof, and because of the roof. These four translations, interpretations, ways of living and being in three words.

I use these multiples to navigate my surroundings, hoping for a better understanding of what is left. What is left behind and what is left moving on. 

How can I put this world into words?

This is where I begin to draw from the roof I come from. 

I continue to travel between where I am and where I was. Each time I move, the roof changes and seems to get further and further away. This is an illusion. While I look out the window of the train car I can see everything that is closest to me speed by, while the mountains off in the distance remain. 

I have not figured out whether my moms roof is speeding by, or if it is my mountain. 

I am driven to share what I unearth in the peripheries, to invite the consideration of a slow pace, trace, and retracing. I explore place, memory, belonging, where they come together and when they depart through the use of graphite, light,  words, paper, movement, translucency, and disappearances. The resulting drawings are attempts at forming a constellation, a practice that demands the viewer look at subtle changes, and to notice when we decide to start looking. 

To what extent can someone be removed from where they were and still be a part of where they used to be? 

My answer starts with an echo, reacting and interacting with its surroundings. My drawings are receptors to these echoes, able to tune into frequencies searching for what was overlooked. Echoes respond to their surroundings, beginning from one point and continue on carrying and depositing information from the surfaces they touch.

Echoes continue on beyond the fluent receiver. 

When we begin to notice is a placeholder, our attention affixed onto a shifting threshold, this practice offers attempts of navigation on a tumbling surface. There is no beginning, middle or end to any of these attempts, only a place of entry.