Hugo Zelada-Romero

Nothing Wept Here brings together photography, sculpture, and video shaped by personal memory, cultural symbols, and experimental image-making. The works move through spaces where the performed and the real bleed together. An acted tear lingers with the same weight as grief.
At the center of the show is a video installation built from a slowed fragment of the 1928 film The Passion of Joan of Arc, overlaid with black-and-white footage of owls in rapid glitch cycles. One image moves too slowly to land, the other too quickly to grasp. Together they form a meditation on sorrow, survival, and perception.
Many works begin as photographs and are transformed through digital drawing and laser engraving. The surfaces hold accumulated errors, ruptures, and embedded acrylic forms that echo wings, lightning, or breath. Gestures toward biblical angels or unseen forces. The photograph is treated as both image and object, a material shaped by belief.
Other works are sculptural. Digital collages become physical through 3D printing in plastic, mounted on metal, and presented in wooden crates. The crates function as both storage and display, referencing the language of museums, reliquaries, and cargo cults. Pop culture artifacts and childhood symbols are recontextualized, not as sentimental relics but as raw material, stripped of nostalgia. Errors accumulate in the translation from digital to analog and back again, artifacts of process rather than failure. Intention and production intertwine, neither opposing nor resolving, but generating new configurations.

Wichita, KS June 2025