Sofia Sanchez Borboa - The Spaces We Inhabit

Hope College, Michigan

Photo credit: Hope College

As winter’s muted tones settle over Michigan, The Spaces We Inhabit brings warmth and color to the De Pree Gallery, transforming it into a dialogue between the season’s quiet stillness and the lively interlaced forms of Mexican artist Laura Villarreal. Her site-specific installation, woven from thread, reimagines the gallery’s architecture, filling it with layers of movement, texture, and memories. As the artworks stand in stark contrast to the bare, dormant landscape outside, the exhibition invites viewers to step into a space where the concept of home is both familiar and newly animated by her vision.

Photo credit: Hope College

Drawing inspiration from the layered textures of some of her family’s houses in Monterrey, Villarreal’s work is a meditation on home and remembrance. She explores its worn walls—a space marked by time and shifting fortunes—as a symbol of endurance to transform the gallery’s surfaces into an immersive installation that reimagines structure and form. Throughout the performance video, the viewer can see Villarreal enact a quiet ritual, washing a weathered wall, turning this simple gesture into a poignant act of preservation. Her intervention captures the ways in which social and temporal imprints mark the spaces we inhabit, layering them with memory, culture, and history.

Photo credit: Hope College

The gallery furthermore brings this vision to life, threading fiber works, photographs, sculptures, and painted forms through the space in organic geometries that weave their way through the room, redefining the architecture itself. The work invites viewers to walk experiencing Villarreal’s interpretation of space as a physical and emotional encounter with memory. Each piece resonates with ideas of perseverance, shaped by colors and textures that reflect both individual and collective histories. Villarreal’s woven strings echo the forces that shape our identities and experiences, especially within the spaces we consider home.

Photo credit: Hope College

Through The Spaces We Inhabit, Villarreal invites us to see the places we reside in as more than structures but as intimate repositories of memory, heritage, and strength. This exhibition offers a moment to reflect on the warmth we carry within and the histories that resonate in our concept of home—especially during wintertime when most of our time is spent indoors. It is both a celebration of resilience and an invitation to connect with the quiet strength that binds us to the spaces we hold dear, transforming the gallery into a contemplative realm of home.

Photo credit: Hope College