2017–2018
Sculpture installation
Sculpture installation
The Doctor began with a small figure drawn from a Venezuelan spiritual image — one of those presences absorbed into memory before they are fully understood.
Through repetition, one figure became many. Gathered together, placed in water, or seen through translucency; slowly moved away from representation and toward something less certain: a trace, a companion, perhaps an absence.
Memory rarely travels intact. Distance softens its edges. Familiar symbols lose some of their original clarity and quietly acquire new meanings. What once belonged to a particular place can become strange again, while somehow remaining close.
Among the repeated figures, sameness never quite becomes unity. Each stands within the group and slightly apart from it. Their closeness suggests shelter; their silence, solitude. The work rests within that delicate space, between belonging to something and remaining oneself.
The Doctor reflects on what continues after leaving a place behind: not memory preserved exactly, but memory altered by time, distance, and experience.
For me, the work also returns to something very simple: I grew up with Dr. José Gregorio Hernández beside my bed, and with a mother deeply devoted to him — a quiet presence familiar in so many Venezuelan homes, carried through generations as faith, comfort, and memory.
