Selected Work / Patron Saints of the Everyday
Patron Saints of the Everyday
Heritage as devotion — sacred symbols surfacing in the ordinary diaspora day.
Advertising campaign · 2025
Role
Creative Director & Artist
Scope
Mixed-media collage series (with cinematic studies)
Outcome
A pan-Latin, diaspora-facing series on carrying the sacred into the mundane
Challenge
Diaspora carries its saints in its pockets — a milagro, a Guadalupe candle, a papel-picado memory — but the places we actually live are laundromats, bus stops, parking garages, and airport carousels. The challenge was to honor that devotion without nostalgia or kitsch: to let the sacred symbol sit inside the fluorescent ordinary and still read as holy.
Opportunity
Pan-Latin visual culture is unusually rich in portable icons — the Sacred Heart, cempasúchil, the luchador, the mate gourd, the Andean manta. Dropped into mundane North American spaces, each becomes a small altar to belonging. The opportunity was to build a series where the symbol and the setting argue with each other, and devotion wins.
Strategy
One symbol, one ordinary room, one act of reverence per frame. I worked the series twice — first as cinematic studies to find each composition and story beat, then remade in mixed-media paper collage so the images carry the handmade, votive quality of the traditions themselves: torn paper, foil, thread, the texture of something built by hand and kept.
Process
Cast each icon to a setting until the pairing felt inevitable — the Sacred Heart over the washing machines, papel picado over the empty tracks, the manta on the baggage carousel. The cinematic pass locked light and framing; the collage pass rebuilt each scene from cut paper, newsprint, foil, and stitched thread, giving the whole series one tactile, devotional surface.
Creative Direction
Held the collage as the finished voice and kept the cinematic frames as the studies behind it — a visible before/after that shows the thinking. One unified handmade palette across all pieces, warm sacred color against cold public space, so eleven scenes read as a single body of work rather than a set of illustrations.
Outcome
A pan-Latin, diaspora-facing collage series with a clear point of view, browsable as paired carousels and downloadable as a full PDF set. Proof of a concept carried across many frames and two full treatments — authored, repeatable, and unmistakably a series.
Lessons learned
The holier the symbol, the more ordinary the room should be. Devotion reads loudest against fluorescent light.
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