Stomping Grounds: Senior Seminar Highlights Show
Paulina Marceleño
Aquí Solo en la Playa is a multimedia installation that traces the experience of displacement and the ongoing search for grounding within transient spaces. Moving between painting and 8mm film, the work reflects the layered, shifting nature of memory and belonging. The title, drawn from the song, Cuando Calienta el Sol, evokes both nostalgia and impermanence, echoing the tension between the place that shaped me and the ones I continue to inhabit.
Texas, a landscape defined by warmth, openness, and the quiet rhythms of home, has developed my earliest forms of self. Its colors, sounds, and stories remain embedded in the way I view the world. What once felt saturated became subdued when I moved to New York at eighteen. To navigate this emotional distance, I began recording conversations with my family, creating an archive of voices that tethered me to the place I came from. These auditory fragments—filled with laughter and familiar cadences—weave through the grain of 8mm film, allowing memory to surface through sound as much as image. The paintings, rendered in vibrant reds and blues, echo the experience of living between two emotional terrains, never fully anchored in one.
Aquí Solo en la Playa becomes not only a meditation on displacement but a record of my ongoing search for belonging—a space where Texas and New York coexist.