the colors of the days
los colores de los días
May 2025
curatorial statement | Maria Elena Ortiz
Inspired by personal memories, Indigenous Mesoamerican craft and European art traditions, Brenda Melgoza Ciardiello presents the exhibition The Colors of the Days. Realized in an intimate apartment, this exhibition includes a variety of media, ranging from sculptures, photographs, video and paintings, in which the artist explores childhood memories, landscapes, and dreams. In The Colors of the Days, she places her artworks within the settings of a lived-in apartment to create an ambience that alludes to a surrealist dream or an uncanny encounter, merging lived experiences with alternative realities. She invites the viewer into her family archive, creating a physical representation for the multiplicity of her identity.
As a child Melgoza Ciardiello grew up between Texas and Mexico City–a transcultural experience of diaspora and movement that informs her works. Having to negotiate living in divergent places, she incorporates motifs of these landscapes into her paintings, videos and photographs. Some of these symbols are the iconic Metropolitan Cathedral in Mexico City, as well as images of figs, papayas, and prickly pear cactus plants. At times, she includes images of herself as a child placed within these characters, embodying her memories and transcultural connections. Fascinated with Mesoamerican pottery, Melgoza Ciardiello creates ceramics and sculptures that explore the human body and the folk practice of milagros–also known as ex-votos or religious charms used for healing and prayer. With a nostalgic sensibility, Melgoza Ciardiello creates milagros for her own childhood memories of rupture and displacement.
artist bio
Brenda is a Texas-based interdisciplinary artist, writer, and educator born in Mexico City. Incorporating painting, ceramic sculpture, and elements of the photographic, she describes her visual work as a manifested yearning to propagate roots, to cultivate connection and indigeneity through engagements with the natural world and memory. Mostly raised in Texas, she has also lived / studied in Italy, the U.K., New York City, New England, the Rocky Mountains and the Middle East. She has shown her work nationally and internationally and recently attended the Mudhouse Residency in Crete, Greece.
Currently based in Fort Worth, Texas with her husband and three sons, Brenda shows, teaches, and maintains a regular artistic practice. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Art History and Classical Civilizations from the University of Notre Dame, a Master of Science in Education from The City College of New York, and an MFA from Lesley University in Cambridge, MA. She was a 2021 Carter Community Artist with the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth.
Walking down a brown dusty road, on an anonymous street in a place she’d never known of or been before, she saw the pink house with the giant green cactus in front of it, pink prickly pears bursting with sunshine, and she wondered: what if my grandmother still lived here and I could walk up, knock on the door, give her a hug and kiss, and step back into her kitchen to help her make chicken soup (I can still smell) for dinner?
Instead she took a picture of it on a beige Tuesday,
in a place that felt like Saturday,
and walked off with a tiny transparent thorn in her foot that stayed there for the rest of her life.
esa flor ya no retoña, tiene muerto el corazón, 2025
photomontage, ceramic cups, prickly pear flowers
on archival rag paper on panel
22 x 30 inches
memory guide
you can go home again, so long as you understand that home is a place you have never been, 2025
photomontage on archival rag paper on panel
22 x 18 inches
jardines del recuerdo
I found out on a Wednesday, and Wednesday is a cloud. On a Wednesday I walked into a house after almost twenty years and found pictures of myself I’d never seen adorning every wall - old, cared-for pictures of a father, a grandmother, an uncle and cousin I’d never known. They were all hugging me.
I recognized only myself. I recognized my eyes brown, I recognized my smile pink and then, suddenly, maybe because of how the color of the dress I was wearing felt, I recognized the smell that hung in the air. It was red pozole and it felt like a Saturday because Saturday is a passing cloud revealing a splendid rainbow across a blue sky, the exuberant saturation the world has only in the moments just after the rain has stopped and, suddenly,
the sun comes out.
tazitas, 2024
various clays from various places, acrylic, glaze (origins unknown)
1 x 1 x 1 inch each
tazitas
Hours and days we sat at that kitchen table, tazitas de cafe, sobremesa (there’s no word in English for that - the time after a meal when you linger longer, ordering excuses to sit and talk), children intermingled with adults, learning how to take our coffee, how to paint our nails, how to comfort a friend.
Hours and days. we played with the little ceramic dish sets brought from the market, cups so tiny they were impossible to drink from; held in tension, a meniscus, a bit of “tea” always stayed at the bottom and we licked at it with our tongues, laughing and trying to be ladies like our mom beautiful brown days and hours we warmed and served and drank our memories,
pretending, again and again.
milagros en La Catedral Metropolitana de la Asunción de la Santísima Virgen María a los Cielos de la Ciudad de México, 2025
photomontage on archival rag paper on panel
18 x 24 inches
milagros en la catedral
“Hija, I’m very devoted to the Virgin Mary. It would make me so happy if you would join me in lighting a candle at her altar this afternoon to give thanks for your return after all these years.” “Claro, Abuelo.”
My grandfather died on the same sunny day as I’d given birth to my last son eight years earlier in another mountain city. He lived through the death of his only love, his only daughter, and the disappearance of his first granddaughter. We never went to the altar the day I returned, but he told me that one of the memories of me he’d held dearest in my absence was that of me praying to the Virgin in a church when I was three years old, just months before the last time he saw me.
“Fuiste un milagro,” he would say.
dale dale dale, no pierdas el tino
(porque si lo pierdes, pierdes el camino), 2025
photomontage on archival rag paper on panel
18 x 24 inches
dale
You’re supposed to blindfold people and spin them the number of years old they are plus one or two (depending on the age and the person) before they’re allowed to hit the piñata, just so they don’t break it open the first time they try
because then all the secrets would spill out
and maybe you’d realize who you really are.
colors of the days, 2025
watercolor and acrylic on Yupo on panel
22 x 30 inches
countours of a place
What if I trace the geographic contours of the place I was born, a memory map, and suddenly remember what it felt like to be raised there (the little pink plastic tub for bath time, the grass tickling my legs as I lay in the garden, the way we left in a blue car one day and never came back) — the colors of the days?
Papá, ya (papaya), 2024
watercolor on Yupo
11 x 14 in
Pepino, Papaya
It was a gray Sunday when we were living in London when I heard Nigella Lawson say on television that her mother used to cut strips off the skin of cucumbers so they looked striped before slicing them for a salad and I thought: how funny, my Mexican mother does that too. “I don’t expect you to do it, it’s just a habit of maternal legacy,” she said.
*
My dad hated papaya, but my biological father always had one on his kitchen counter and, one time, when I was 35, on a warm and yellow Sunday, I came down from bed and he had prepared a small plate of sliced papaya just for me with lots of lime juice and brown sugar, just the way I like it —
strips of golden skin lay discarded in the trash,
rays of orange golden sunshine cut carefully and thrown away
by a father that they told me had no interest in raising me
when I was born
(is a Sunday).
fig monologue
I climbed the fig tree as soon as we arrived at my grandmother’s house, climbed it as high as it would bear my nine years of splendid life. It wasn’t season but in my mind I gorged myself with the plump, purple fruits until the light became night. Purple-handed, I remember having to stare down at the floor, scared, as I walked back inside the house for the first time that day, in a lifetime, eyes shut because the sun eclipsed the moon, and all the uneaten figs stayed outside keeping the invisible moon company, inverted flowers both, both outside in.
fig monologue (la higuera), 2025
photomontage on archival rag paper on panel
18 x 24 inches
"what the water gave me / lo que me el agua me dio," 2025
digital video, 4:47
Scrambling through dry mountains on a hot and sunny Wednesday in my 40s (Wednesday is a sunny cloud), my children running in many directions, I paused to catch my fuchsia breath, parched, on an unplanned hike.
Near my left foot I noticed a small hole in the ground. I crouched and saw that in it water bubbled, surging forth frantically from an underground stream. While it bubbled without stopping, the water never overflowed, and I thought, “it was here all the time, beneath me, following my path.”
la espuma de esta herida es lo que sobra de tu mar, 2025
not Mexican porcelain (origin unknown),
green isle glaze and sand (Maine), glaze
overall dimensions variable but approximately: 12 x 12 inches
You still remind me of the time we climbed a pomegranate tree somewhere in Campania, somewhere in the heart of the autumn and, drunk, in love, I plucked a bright red fruit and jumped down, ripped the skin off and stuffed my mouth completely full with the seeds and then I turned and kissed you passionately and spat all the seeds in your mouth too and we laughed and kissed so hard they spilled all over the ground and it was a Thursday, and Thursday is a green tree near the ocean, well-worth the climb.
diptych: yo quiero ser un solo ser, 2023
photomontage on archival rag paper on panel
overall dimensions: 9 x 24 inches
cielito lindo
The wind was a little bit restless the day she was playing in the little white plastic pool that her mother had bought her. She entertained herself, naked, in slightly-too-cold water, while she was at work, and she had to stay with her grandmother.
The dog didn’t seem overly-bothered when the wind picked up and carried the girl away into a pink and endless sky over the largest city in the world.
Luckily, she grabbed her towel and pulled it into the pool with her just before it disappeared overboard into the Valley of Mexico. I never saw them again.
installation views