Lisu Vega Weaves Landscapes at MDC Kendall Campus Gallery

Lisu Vega’s “Weaving Landscapes of Memory” opened Thursday, Feb. 19 at Miami Dade College’s Kendall Campus Gallery and will be on exhibit through Thursday, March 19.

Lisu Vega doesn’t treat memory as something fixed. In “Weaving Landscapes of Memory,” which opened Thursday, Feb. 19, 2026, at Miami Dade College’s Kendall Campus Gallery, she builds an environment where recollection shifts, overlaps and floats in space.

During a walkthrough of the exhibition space, the installation felt less like a series of artworks and more like entering a suspended terrain. Fifteen-foot textile panels hang from the ceiling, forming a passageway of translucent surfaces printed with photographic fragments. Moving through them, light filters across organza and woven rope, and images appear and disappear depending on perspective.

Vega has long worked with photography, but here she pushes it into fiber. Rather than presenting photographs as framed images, she transfers them onto textiles she weaves herself from rope remnants. The rope holds its own history — frayed, weathered, absorbing time — and once stitched onto sheer organza, the images take on a layered instability. Nothing feels entirely permanent.

Lisu Vega with one of the suspended textile panels in her immersive installation “Weaving Landscapes of Memory” at the Kendall Campus Gallery at Miami Dade College.” Photo by Francesco Casale)

The project stems from a recurring childhood memory. Vega recalls traveling to her grandparents’ home and watching the landscape shift through a moving car window. That sensation of motion — of places dissolving into one another — becomes the conceptual backbone of the exhibition. Instead of presenting a single documented place, she interweaves photographs taken over years and across countries into a composite landscape.

The resulting environment feels imagined yet familiar. Architecture overlaps with figures. Past moments bleed into newer ones. Three countries, multiple time periods and different personal geographies coexist on the same woven surface. Vega isn’t reconstructing a specific memory; she’s constructing the way memory behaves.

Organza plays a crucial role in this effect. The translucent fabric responds to light and airflow, reinforcing the idea that memory is never static. As viewers shift positions, images blur, sharpen or partially vanish. The installation asks participants that they not just look but slow down and physically navigate recollection.

Vega describes the work as an attempt to weave “tactile memory” — something that lives between image and material. The photographs embedded into the rope-based textiles are neither purely digital nor purely physical. They exist in a threshold space, mirroring how memories persist yet transform over time.

Curator Rina Gitlin positions the exhibition as immersive, and that immersion is not metaphorical. The scale matters. At 15-feet long, the suspended panels create a landscape viewers must walk through. The experience is spatial rather than frontal.

The exhibition also extends beyond viewing. An artist talk is scheduled for noon on Saturday, March 7. A “Photography and Memory Workshop” will take place on Monday, March 9 and Wednesday, March 11 from 6:40 to 9:10 p.m., both held within the exhibition space.

Installation view: Lisu Vega, “Weaving Landscapes of Memory” at Miami Dade College’s Kendall Campus Art Gallery, through Thursday, March 19. (Photo by Francesco Casale).

The workshop builds on Vega’s interest in photography as more than documentation. In conversation, she describes photography as a way to investigate memory — to document, but also to intervene. Participants will explore how photographs can be combined with textile elements to create memorial projects that intertwine past and future. The process emphasizes selection, layering and narrative construction, encouraging attendees to consider how personal archives can be reshaped into something communal and tactile.

That blending of memory and material defines the installation itself. The woven rope structures, printed imagery, and sheer surfaces create a landscape that feels under construction. It doesn’t offer a single story. Instead, it suggests that recollection is always being revised.

Taking pause within the hanging panels, something subtle happens: the images often trigger their own fragments of memory. The space becomes participatory. Between tactile material and photographic image, the installation gently folds the spectator into its fabric.

WHAT: Lisu Vega solo exhibition “Weaving Landscapes of Memory”

WHERE:  Miami Dade College -Kendall Campus, Building M, 11011 SW 104th  St., Miami

WHEN: noon to 7:30 p.m., Monday through Friday, 2 to 7:30 p.m.,  Saturday, Closed on Sundays. Through Thursday, March 19.

COST: Free 

INFORMATION: www.lisuvega.com/

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