Habitar el Vacío by Sergio Suárez

For the temporary installation, Habitar el Vacío, staged in the Art of the Americas galleries, artist Sergio Suárez (b. 1995, Mexico City, Mexico) explores themes of loss, emptiness, and absence. Rather than displaying museum objects, Suárez fills eight vitrines with shadows traced from artifacts in the Michael C. Carlos Museum's collection, highlighting the ways in which museum collecting not only separates objects from the people, communities, and contexts to which they belong, but often occludes Indigenous ways of looking and knowing in favor of settler colonial categories of classification such as date, period, and style. The shadows were created using 3D-printed copies of the following objects selected by Suárez from the museum’s permanent collection.