Pueblo Fantasma

October 3 – November 29, 2026 | Public Land Gallery, Sacramento

Public Land Gallery is pleased to present "Pueblo Fantasma," Mariana Varela’s first solo exhibition in the United States. "Pueblo Fantasma" takes inspiration from Mercado de Jamaica in Mexico City, a sprawling traditional market filled with flowers, food, candy, toys, household goods, and everyday objects. Around Día de Muertos, the market becomes especially vivid, overflowing with cempasúchil in yellow, orange, and deep pink, transforming into a place where daily life and ceremony naturally exist side by side. Varela reinterprets images encountered there through ceramic sculpture, installation, and black-and-white film photography. Bottles and cans are remade as sculptural objects, floral and animal forms recall the elaborate arrangements found throughout the market, and ghostly figures appear within ordinary scenes, suggesting people who are no longer there but whose presence remains. Across the exhibition, familiar objects shift in material, scale, and context. The works consider how meaning gathers around ordinary things through memory, ritual, personal experience, and collective understanding. Rather than functioning as replicas, they feel more like translations: images carried from one place and moment into another.

"Pueblo Fantasma" creates a world where memory has a physical presence, and where what is gone is allowed to linger.

Exhibition Images

About the Artist

Mariana Varela is a Mexican artist originally from Tampico, Tamaulipas, and currently based in San Francisco. Her work has been exhibited at Good Mother Gallery, Soft Times Gallery, Your Mood Projects, and 120710 in the Bay Area.

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