Karla García
Artist
Between the Land and Sky, 2025
Installation by Karla García at the Project Space of the GOCA Galleries in Colorado Springs, CO.
Essay by Aleina Grace Edwards for the Galleries of Contemporary Art at UCCS, 2025.
Abstract
Scaling Stars explores Karla García’s installation Between the Land and Sky through the intertwined lenses of landscape, mythology, and feminist history. Drawing on her Juárez–El Paso upbringing and nightly rituals, García shapes hand-built terra cotta cacti as metaphors for resilience and identity. The work reframes the myth of Malinalxōchitl—abandoned and misunderstood—and echoes Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s search for intellectual and spiritual freedom. Star-like glazes, concrete forms, and breathing clay construct an imagined desert borderland where memory, exile, and regeneration coexist. Edwards positions García’s installation as a space of belonging beyond borders, between land and sky.
Artist Statement
Between the Land and Sky, is an installation rooted in the desert borderlands and prairie ecologies that have shaped my understanding of land, memory, and transformation. Reflecting on past works, I reimagine a landscape composed of recycled ceramic grasses, concrete blocks, and terra cotta cacti sculptures. The glazed surfaces of the cacti evoke a starry night sky embedded in their forms, drawing connections between the cosmos and sacred land.
This body of work merges myth and material. I continue my reflections on the exiled desert goddess Malinalxochitl and the poetry of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz—voices that shape stories across time and space. In this terrain, the cacti become sacred beings, and the grasses act as connective tissue: linking the land beneath to ourselves, to the sky above.
My process remains grounded in traditional hand-building techniques, yet the forms appear to shrink, expand, and shift like breath or memory. Through these gestures, I invite viewers to pause and consider the landscape not as backdrop, but as a living record of resilience, transformation, and sacred connection.
Documentation photos by Lynné Bowman Cravens for the Galleries of Contemporary Art at UCCS, 2025.
Opening and reception photos by Stellar Propeller Studio for the Galleries of Contemporary Art at UCCS, 2025.
