This mixed-media painting was developed over the course of 2025, revisited intermittently and built through accumulation—much like memory itself. The work reflects on childhood as a space of joy, abundance, and collective presence, drawing from the artist’s recollections of Sundays spent with family, community, and shared rituals.
At the center is an ice cream truck rendered as both spectacle and sanctuary. Its open window invites the viewer inward, offering a glimpse into a world of excess, nostalgia, and desire. The truck operates as a symbol of consumerism—bright, seductive, and fleeting—while the melting SpongeBob popsicle held by the ice cream vendor underscores the impermanence of mass-produced pleasure. In contrast, the small paletero figure represents overlooked labor: the informal workers whose persistence and humanity exist in the shadows of corporate dominance.
The composition is densely populated with a diverse cast of figures—children in motion, adults lingering at the periphery, and fragments of personal history embedded throughout, including photographic references to the artist themself. These figures mirror the multiplicity of the artist’s lived experience and affirm community as a shared, layered construction rather than a singular narrative.
Material choices further reinforce the work’s themes. The ice cream vendor is sculpted from polymer clay, physically extending beyond the painted surface and collapsing the boundary between illusion and object. Overhead, real wires stretch across the composition, punctuated by hanging shoes—a familiar marker of urban neighborhoods and a quiet testament to presence, survival, and memory. Together, these elements transform the painting into an altar of lived experience, where nostalgia, labor, consumption, and belonging coexist.