Inherited Labor 

Curated by Emireth Herrera Valdes 

The Border Gallery + GHOSTMACHINE

October 4 – October 25, 2025 

Opening Reception: October 4, 6-9 PM 

The Border Gallery is proud to present Inherited Labor at GHOSTMACHINE GALLERY, a group exhibition curated by Emireth Herrera Valdés that continues her series exploring  immigrant labor, this time focusing on reproductive work. Anthropologists Michael Hardt (1999) and Stefanie Muehlebach (2011) describe reproductive work as a form of affective labor that generates emotions such as love, care, and happiness, while also creating value and enabling workers to navigate—and resist—exploitative relations under advanced capitalism. Featuring the work of five artists: Daisy Patton, Jen Liu, Gabino A. Castelán, Anna Fabricius, and Zac Hacmon, the exhibition examines reproductive labor as a form of labor passed down through generations, not only as a means of survival but also as a way of preserving culture, care, and family bonds. Through repetitive gestures, learned patterns, daily routines, and rituals, this form of labor transmits knowledge, skills, and values that sustain both individuals and communities.

Daisy Patton reflects on memory and inheritance through layered paintings that combine archival photographs with organic ornamentation. Growing up watching her mother sew, embroider, knit, and garden, Patton developed her unique language rooted in her ancestors. Her exploration of her father’s Iranian heritage encouraged her engagement with archives, especially with the objects she lacks from her father, family photographs. In Untitled (Seated Pink Woman with Red Painted Backdrop) (2024), the floral fabric frame evokes both her maternal and paternal influences through sewing and ornamentation akin to Persian miniature paintings, while red shoes emphasize the sitter’s individuality. From the sitter’s hands sprout delicate blue branches and blossoms, symbols of cultural rootedness and continuity.

Jen Liu investigates how erased histories persist as haunting presences in the present. Hello Hello Hung Out To Dry (2025), from her ongoing project MERCURY, examines the lives of nineteenth-century Chinese sex workers in the Americas and the resonances of their exploitation with today’s digital gig economy. Blending narrative, performance, AI-generated imagery, and alchemical motifs, Liu employs mercury as a metaphor for memory loss, bodily dissociation, and fluid identity. The portrait of a woman, with black hair silvered by mercury, eyes half-open, and facial features formed by hanging organic shapes—suggests a fragmented body. To the right, a delicate, elongated hand underscores fluidity while alluding to the fragility of undervalued reproductive and sexual labor.

Gabino A. Castelán’s works on paper depict laboring bodies within fragmented dreamscapes shaped by memory, desire, and dissonance. In Approaching Thunderstorm (2021), an elderly man exits the frame, children appear faintly sketched on a wall, and a dog rests at the center, anchoring the domestic scene. Surreal landscapes visible through windows suggest portals of longing and escape beyond household boundaries. In The Sweeper and Fruit Vendor Meeting the Ghost of Berta Cáceres…Her Ghost is Staring at Us (2021), Castelán invokes the murdered Honduran environmental activist through Nahuatl mythology, nineteenth-century pictorial traditions, and the artist’s own archives, merges political witness with mythic time: a snippet of sunset sky, flowers blooming around the goddess Cōātlīcue, and spectral presences. Across these works, figures move through metamorphic journeys where human potential collides with histories of labor and exploitation. By juxtaposing rest, love, and leisure with resistance and struggle, Castelán affirms the right to live in complexity and community.

Zac Hacmon, in collaboration with Miki, presents Miki (2025), a sound sculpture giving voice to a lifelong housekeeper from Durango, Mexico. Now in her eighties and still working for the same family in Los Angeles, the sculpture emits Miki singing El Corrido de Durango, composed by Graciela Olmos, a lullaby her grandfather once sang to her father—a layered echo of heritage and pride. This song links her personal memories with the revolutionary history of Pancho Villa’s era. Emerging from the gallery wall, this site-specific sculpture evokes Miki’s dual identity as both housekeeper and mother. Through spatial and sonic intervention, Hacmon highlights care work as a force that carries legacy and perpetuates generational patterns. 

Anna Fabricius presents the intergenerational transmission of industrial labor through generation and as a collective experience. In Erika, Cable Assembler (2013), a worker compresses an eight-hour routine into a ten-minute performance, revealing the discipline and implicit knowledge inscribed in repetitive tasks. In IMMATERIAL (2017), Fabricius presents empty factory floors as choreographed spaces with empathy and dignity. In Experience Engrosses the Memory (2017), former textile workers in Łódź, Poland reconstruct not only technical practices but also the social and emotional fabric of factory life—the rhythms, gestures, and collective memory that shaped identity and expectation across generations.

Inherited Labor pays tribute to transgenerational labor that sustains immigrant families, communities, and societies at large. Through the featured works, reproductive labor emerges as a force of creativity, persistence, resistance, memory, and transformation. This exhibition illuminates how these forms of labor—whether in private or public spaces, industrial settings, urban environments, or archives—carry legacy and appreciation for those who eternalize it.

Biographies

Curator 

Emireth Herrera Valdés (b. Saltillo, Mexico) is an independent curator and writer based in New York. She has curated exhibitions including Invisible Hands at 601Artspace, S.T.E.P. at the Queens Museum, Whispers at Spring/Break 2023, Tongue Tide, and 3459’ at Flux Factory. In collaboration with the Border Gallery, she co-curated Invisible Bodies at Pennsylvania State University, and with the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA) she co-curated Grilo/Fernández-Muro at the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU. Herrera has contributed to educational initiatives between MARCO Museum (Monterrey, Mexico) and the Autonomous University of Coahuila. Her project From Vulnerable Territory to Utopia was presented at ARoS Museum in Aarhus, Denmark, and at The Museum for All People: Art, Accessibility, and Social Inclusion, part of the MUSACCES Consortium at Complutense University of Madrid. Her writings have appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, Arte Fuse, Cultbytes, and ISLAA’s VISTAS. She has worked in the education departments of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Hispanic Society of America Museum and Library, and New York University. She was curator-in-residence at Residency Unlimited (2015) and guest curator for NYC Health + Hospitals’ Arts in Medicine Community Mural Project (2022). Currently, she serves as Associate Curator and Community Outreach Coordinator in the Arts in Medicine department at NYC Health + Hospitals. Herrera holds an M.A. in Art History from the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU, and a B.A. in Architecture from the Autonomous University of Coahuila.

Artists 

Daisy Patton (b. Los Angeles, CA) is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice explores storytelling, family, living memory, and the complexities of identity and connection. Raised between California and Oklahoma by a white mother from the American South and an absent Iranian father, Patton’s work reflects on cultural landscapes, ambiguous absences, and the transmission of personal and collective histories. Based in western Massachusetts, she has presented solo exhibitions at the CU Art Museum (University of Colorado Boulder), the Harold J. Miossi Gallery (Cuesta College), and the Chautauqua Institution, among others. Her work has also been shown at MCA Denver, Spring/Break NYC, the Tampa Museum of Art, Utah MOCA, and the Katonah Museum of Art. Patton’s work is held in collections including the Denver Art Museum, the Tampa Museum of Art, the Ulrich Museum of Art (Wichita State University), UMCA (UMass Amherst), Mattatuck Museum, and Boston Logan International Airport with Delta Airlines. Her practice has been featured in Hyperallergic, Transition Magazine (Harvard University), The Denver Post, and The Chautauquan Daily. In 2021, Minerva Projects Press published Broken Time Machines: Daisy Patton, a book of essays and poetry on her work. Patton earned her MFA from The School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston/Tufts University, and a BFA in Studio Arts from the University of Oklahoma. She has held residencies at Anderson Ranch, MASS MoCA, and RedLine Denver, and received awards from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, among others.

Jen Liu is a New York-based visual artist working in video, painting, performance, and sculpture on diasporic Asian identities, postcolonial economies, techno-/bio-politics, and the re-motivating of archival artifacts. In her most recent work, she has used genetic engineering and dark encryption to reframe firsthand accounts of electronics workers and created semi-speculative scripts combining corporate brochures and industrial manuals with firsthand accounts of industrial workers and labor activists in Asia. Liu is a recipient of the 2024 Anonymous Was a Woman Award, Hewlett 50 Arts Commission, Creative Capital Grant, LACMA Art + Technology Lab, Guggenheim Fellowship in Film/Video, and the Cornell Tech \Art Award, among others. She has presented work at MoMA, the Whitney Museum, the New Museum, SculptureCenter, Kunsthaus Zürich, Kunsthalle Wien, MUSAC León, KW Berlin, multiple Berlinale exhibitions at AdK, the Royal Academy and ICA in London, and was included in the 2015 Shanghai Biennial, 2019 Singapore Biennial, 2023 Future of Today Biennial (Beijing), and the 2023 Taipei Biennial. She has also received multiple grants and residencies, including Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart; Para Site, Hong Kong; and Pioneer Works in New York. She has been Professor of Film/Video at Bennington College since 2019.

Gabino A. Castelán (b.1986, Epatlán, Puebla, México) lives and works in Florida. Castelán received an MFA in combined media and a BFA in painting from Hunter College. He is a conceptual and materially experimental artist whose practice spans painting, drawing, sculpture, and installation. Castelán’s work engages the poetics of image, form, and spatial perception to explore everyday life, myth, and transformation across the philosophical and spiritual dimensions of being. His work was currently included in the X FACTOR: Latinx Artists and the Reconquest of the Everyday at the USF Contemporary Art Museum, Tampa, FL. Castelán has had solo exhibitions at Mahara+Co Gallery, Miami, FL; Helen M. Salzberg Gallery, Palm Beach, FL; and Donald M. Ephraim Family Foundation Gallery, Palm Beach, FL. He has participated in group exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami, Miami, FL; The Bronx Museum of the Arts, Bronx, NY; and the Kunsthaus Baselland, Basel, Switzerland. Castelán has received the USF Contemporary Art Museum Commission Award; the Helen M. Salzberg Visiting Artists Fellowship; and the South Florida Cultural Consortium Visual and Media Artists Fellowship. His previous residencies include the Helen M. Salzberg Visiting Artists at Palm Beach State College, FL; Atelier Mondial in Basel, Switzerland; CMOM, Children’s Museum of Manhattan, NYC; and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine. Castelán is an alumnus of the 39th AIM Fellowship program at the Bronx Museum of the Arts. In 2018, he was nominated and selected to travel to Honduras as a part of the U.S. Department of Cultural Affairs Arts Envoy Program. Castelán was an artist-teacher at the Joan Mitchell Foundation from 2012-2016. In 2015, he created a manual for the ongoing artwork “Cultural Workers,” which guides a temporary collective of local and international workers. Cultural Workers activate unoccupied venues and construct ephemeral workers’ clubs, titled Practice of Everyday Life (PoEL). The purpose of the PoEL is to create environments that foster apprenticeship, learning, relaxation, and contemplation.

Zac Hacmon is an artist based in New York. He has recently exhibited at the Pratt Munson Museum, Utica (NY), the Locust Projects, Miami (FL), the Tel Aviv Museum of Art (Israel), Smack Mellon Gallery (New York), Petach Tikva Museum of Art (Israel), Meet Factory Gallery (Czech Republic), and Artsonje Center (South Korea), The MAC, Belfast (Ireland), Hunter East Harlem Gallery (New York), Jack Shainman Gallery (New York), The Border Project Space (New York). Hacmon has had residencies at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Omaha (NE), the Fountainhead, Miami (FL), the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Workspace program (LMCC) and Salem Art Works (NY), MeetFactory Studio (Czech Republic), and MMCA National Art Studio in Seoul (South Korea). He has received the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC) Creative Engagement Grant, the NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship in Craft/Sculpture, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant, the Santo Foundation Individual Artist Award, and the Cafe Royal Cultural Foundation Visual Project Exhibition Grant. Hacmon received an MFA from Hunter College and a BFA from Bezalel Academy of Art and Design (Israel).

Anna Fabricius is a Hungarian visual artist whose work investigates photography, memory, and the politics of representation. Over the past two decades, their practice has been presented in solo and group exhibitions across Europe, Asia, and the United States, including at the Kiscelli Museum, Ludwig Museum, MODEM, Kassák Museum, Photon Gallery, Ostrale Biennale (Dresden), UNSEEN (Amsterdam), Kunsthalle Budapest, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Shanghai. Their achievements include the Leopold Bloom Award (2025) and the Kassák Contemporary Art Award (2023), along with residencies at Collegium Hungaricum Rome, Taipei Artist Village, Residency Unlimited (New York), Wschodnia Gallery (Łódź), and Ostrale Biennale (Dresden). They are also a recipient of the Derkovits Gyula Fine Art Scholarship and a member of the Association of Hungarian Photographers.