Alicia Ayanegui, Enrique Arriaga Celis, Daniela Bojórquez Vértiz, Virginia Colwell y Raquel Bañón Sodini, Manuela García, Leo Marz, Jonathan Miralda Fuksman, Daniel Monroy Cuevas, Paloma Rosenzweig and Oswaldo Ruiz: In the Shadows, Our Ghosts Lurk

San Antonio, Texas — The panopticon, an 18th century prison design, features large, round rooms with cells lining the walls and a guard tower at its center. With one wall open to outside observers, this building theoretically creates social control through the threat of constant observation. Rather than controlling bodies through space, this design seeks to control minds. Nearly two-and-a-half centuries after its creation, the artists in In the Shadows, Our Ghosts Lurk (En Las Sombras, Nuestros Fantasmas Acechan) respond to the evolution of what curator Fabiola Iza calls “that omniscient gaze,” or how modern technology has contributed to surveillance culture.

In 2025, our public and private spaces often feel like a living panopticon––a space under constant, unknown surveillance. Home security systems feature exterior and interior cameras while CCTVs inside of retail stores, restaurants, and along city streets track passersby. According to GSMA’s 2023 State of Mobile Internet Connectivity Report, over half of the global population owns a smartphone, a surveillance tool in and of itself.

The featured artists in this exhibition experience life under this “omniscient gaze” and through their artwork respond to the anxieties caused by mass observation. For this installation, the main gallery at the Contemporary is transformed into a space full of shadows and half-constructed walls, lending itself to the anxieties of the unknown observer. Oswaldo Ruiz’s video piece features the old Kilmainham prison (Dublin) fading in and out of view and Daniela Bojórquez Vértiz’s photographic landscapes include an amalgamation of buildings, trees, and cars.

Throughout the gallery the artists take viewers through an array of discomforts. Manuela García’s artwork draws the viewer closer through its blurred linear forms and dim palette creating a sense of confusion and questions of perception. Alicia Ayanegui’s paintings use darkness as a tool, painting at night without light, merging limitations of sight with the possibility of her imagination. Jonathan Miralda Fuksman utilizes bold color and simplistic figures frozen in moments of collision, evoking a sense of chaos.

The featured artwork also relies on a tension between the familiar and unknown. The soot-covered drawings by Daniel Monroy Cuevas are smokey and cracked, with curved lines reminiscent of long, boney fingers or a crowded forest, but the artists’ pictorial intent remains a mystery to the viewer. The hand-felted soft sculptures by Paloma Rosenzweig are seemingly familiar representations of hands and eyeballs with an eerie sense of wrongness made persistent by the absence of limbs and sockets. Enrique Arriaga Celis combines simple tools and advanced mechanisms to create a system that converts sound into form, the outcome of which is unpredictable.

The artists also question what happens in the next phase of human evolution at the hands of technological advancement. Leo Marz introduces the possibility of another dimension in his paintings, where time and space collapse after an immeasurable time of digitalization. Virginia Colwell and Raquel Bañón Sodini employ performance to consider remembrance and collective memory, questioning how our current sociopolitical structures use digital technologies that disconnect the person from the ritual of human connection and a tradition of passing down knowledge.

In the words of Curator Fabiola Iza, “Emerging from a paranoid state, the anxious visuality of these works reveals itself in distinct ways. As if filtered through a damaged optic nerve, vision becomes tired and feeble. Contours blur. Materiality turns abstract and diffuse.”

In the Shadows, Our Ghosts Lurk was first exhibited at Laguna in Mexico City, Mexico, a collaborative space for on-site creative production. The exhibition is reconfigured for Contemporary at Blue Star by independent curator Fabiola Iza with support from the Contemporary’s exhibitions staff.