Ernesto Solana: Another Sunset
Ernesto Solana: Another Sunset
May 2 - July 18, 2026
Ernesto Solana, The Anecdote Reveals Something Else V, 2025, Recycled aluminum, neodymium magnets, stainless steel, 41.3 x 28.9 x 33.3 cm (16.26 x 11.38 x 13.11 in)
Ernesto Solana: Another Sunset
May 2, 2026 - July 18, 2026
Press Contact: info@laurathegallery.com
Laura (the gallery)
1125 E 11th St, Houston, TX
Laura (the gallery) is pleased to present Another Sunset, a solo exhibition by Houston and Mexico City-based artist Ernesto Solana (b. 1985, Guadalajara). This is Solana’s first solo exhibition with the gallery and in Texas. The exhibition assembles eight sculptures that incorporate cast bronze, cast aluminum, and found objects, as well as four photographs.
The works in Another Sunset watch a familiar sky from new ground. Conceptually, they draw upon the wildlife migration routes between Texas and Mexico, and the birds that stop to rest along the Gulf Coast before pushing on. Solana’s art incorporates the flowers and insects and detritus he found Mexico, things that a person encounters when they wander on foot. From Mexico City, he has gathered the blooms of Erythrina coralloides — the flame coral tree — iridescent Cotinis beetles, chrysalises, and styrofoam cups stamped with xicalcoliuhqui geometries derived from Mesoamerican design. The result is an ecosystem sketched with art, a symbiosis of flora and fauna, but not without human presence.
One sculpture in the exhibition casts ordinary packing peanuts — compressed into a dense, brick-like cube — in patinated bronze, now finished with a luminous teal. Something designed to disappear becomes something that will not. Resting on top: a single molted feather from a macaw, brilliant and multicolored. A floor sculpture occupies its own territory in the space. The Dioscorea mexicana — known colloquially as the tortoise plant for its rounded, woody base — sends up a single new vine each year. Solana has cast the entire structure in aluminum: the base on the floor, the vine rising nearly six feet from its center. Pierced through the vine’s middle hovers a styrofoam cup. The cup is ubiquitous across Mexico and bears the xicalcoliuhqui pattern. Aluminum pretends to be something cheap and disposable, the ancient geometry repeated so many times it practically disappears into the object it decorates.
That same cup recurs throughout the exhibition. In the large-scale photograph The Problem Here Is the Obvious (Totemic Studies), 2023, the cup floats on the surface of the water at the Tláloc fountain at the Museo Nacional de Antropología in Mexico City. Beneath the cup, Tláloc himself appears inverted in the reflection: the Aztec rain god submerged below a piece of trash that will molecularly outlast almost everything around it. Following the cup around the gallery, we see a cast aluminum sculpture presenting the object slightly crushed, and mounted on a small aluminum shelf a foot above the floor. In this work, the cup stages an encounter between slowness and waste, between permanence and the disposable, transforming what would otherwise be overlooked into a site of unlikely attention.
The wall-mounted aluminum sculptures extend Solana’s attention to botanical and insect life into something closer to architecture. Their stepped geometry references the xicalcoliuhqui and the inverted pyramid forms of Teotihuacán; their surfaces host cast aluminum renderings of Erythrina coralloides flowers and orchids, whose stamens branch into forms uncannily resembling open hands. Someworks carry a blue-green patina; others remain the cool silver of raw metal. Chrysalises dangle from the stepped edges, a reference to the monarch butterfly migration that Solana has documented in photographs taken in the forests of Michoacán.
Two smaller photographs picture birds that Solana observed in his Houston garden, where he keeps sculptures whose polished, mirror-finish metal surfaces attract avian visitors. To render what the birds might see, Solana manipulated the images using a simulation of tetrachromatic vision. The four-cone color perception system that most birds possess, it extends into the ultraviolet spectrum beyond human sight. In these images, the surrounding world shifts into deep blues and periwinkles, while the birds appear as vivid thermal maps of orange, yellow, red, and lime green. One new work — What Feathers Know of Light (Orange-crowned Warbler), 2026 — is presented in a bleached maple frame with a cast recycled aluminum Nymphalis antiopa chrysalis suspended from its lower edge, the object and theimage in conversation about transformation and threshold.
The show’s anchor is a large photograph of a female ocellated turkey — a bird native to the Yucatán Peninsula, and one of the more spectacular animals in the Americas. She stands at the edge of a road near Calakmul, an archaeological site, showing off her iridescent green-bronze feathers. The photograph’s frame is a vivid pink, and the gallery’s far wall matches — an invocation of Luis Barragán, the Mexican architect whose colorful walls defined the visual vocabulary of mid-century Mexican modernism. The turkey’s gaze turns slightly toward the camera, the observer suddenly observed.
Houston sits at the edge of one of the great avian migration corridors in North America. Each spring, millions of birds crossing the Gulf of Mexico make landfall along the Texas coast, many touching down at High Island — less than an hour from the gallery — where roseate spoonbills, great blue herons, and dozens of other species rest and nest before continuing north. The timing of Another Sunset is not accidental. Solana’s interest in wildlife migration is long-standing and inseparable from his practice. The cocoons, the beetles, the orchids that look like hands, the birds seen in ultraviolet colors — these are not metaphors for something else. They remind us of all the actors and agents that coexist in the natural world, from which humans are not separate, above, or beyond.
About the Artist
Solana has presented his solo exhibition Instituto de la Neoprehistoria: Capítulo II at the Guachimontones Archaeological Site in Teuchitlán, Mexico, and participated in exhibitions like Eje Neovolcánico at Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City; Off to Elsewhere at Münchner Kammerspiele, Munich (curated by Çagla Ilk); Memory Shop at Casa Wabi, Puerto Escondido (curated by Nicolás Bourriaud); Entre Irse y Quedarse at Palace Enterprise, Copenhagen; As to Be Inaudible at C/O Berlin (curated by Jörg Colberg); and Transatlántico at Mana Contemporary, New Jersey. In May 2026, he is completing a residency at Casa Nano in Tokyo.
He is also the author of Systema Artificialis, a photo book that examines the consequences of the Anthropocene and proposes new relational models between humanity, culture, and the more-than-human world. Solana holds a diploma in Forest and Wildlife Conservation, a photography degree from the International Center of Photography (ICP) in New York, and an MFA in Photography from the University of Hartford in West Hartford, Connecticut.
For inquiries or additional materials, please contact info@laurathegallery.com.
Ernesto Solana, The Anecdote Reveals Something Else V, 2025, Recycled aluminum, neodymium magnets, stainless steel, 41.3 x 28.9 x 33.3 cm (16.26 x 11.38 x 13.11 in)
Ernesto Solana, What Feathers Know of Light (Mourning Dove) (1/2 + 1 AP), 2026, Archival pigment print, red frame, 13.875 x 10.875 in (35.24 x 27.62 cm)
Ernesto Solana, The Effortless Manner in Which Like-Ness Propagates Through Us XV, 2026, Recycled aluminum, neodymium magnets, 43.2 x 43.5 x 27.3 cm (17.01 x 17.13 x 10.75 in)
Ernesto Solana, An Ornament for No One (Snail), 2025, Recycled aluminum, neodymium magnets, stainless steel, 8.6 x 15.9 x 11.7 cm (3.39 x 6.26 x 4.61 in)
Ernesto Solana, What Feathers Know of Light (Orange-crowned Warbler) (1/2 + 1 AP), 2026, Archival pigment print, bleached maple frame, neodymium magnets, recycled aluminum, 15.25 x 11.625 x 0.375 in (38.74 x 29.53 x 0.95 cm)
Ernesto Solana, The Effortless Manner in Which Like-Ness Propagates Through Us XVI, 2026, Recycled aluminum, neodymium magnets, 36.2 x 38.7 x 24.1 cm (14.25 x 15.24 x 9.49 in)
Ernesto Solana, The Effortless Manner in Which Like-Ness Propagates Through Us XVII, 2026, Recycled aluminum, neodymium magnets, 36.2 x 42.9 x 21.6 cm (14.25 x 16.89 x 8.5 in)
Ernesto Solana, The Anecdote Reveals Something Else IV, 2025, Recycled aluminum, neodymium magnets, stainless steel, 40.6 x 25.1 x 34.3 cm (15.98 x 9.88 x 13.5 in)
Coming soon.
Photography courtesy the artist.