Private Collection
Nina Garibay | August 2026
Studio Maya

Domestic Archaeology

We think of home as an interior — sealed off from the world, a private register of taste and comfort. But nothing in a house begins there. Every object was once brought in: a souvenir, an heirloom, a stray animal taken in, a coat bought for a specific cold. Curate descends from the Latin curare, to care for — the same impulse behind the cabinet of curiosities, where shells sat beside carvings sat beside bones, and a trinket became a treasure simply by being kept and arranged with attention. A home is no different: not a monolith but an accretion — rustic, intimate, seemingly whole — held together only by that same ongoing care. Private Collection reads the household as such a cabinet: objects lifted from shelves, hooks, and corners, isolated against plain grounds as though catalogued for an archive, revealing what a life has gathered, and why.

Nothing in a house originates there. Circus Goes to Town imports the spectacle of a distant market into a sparse interior through a single tasseled lantern; Shell gathers a conch, a carved wooden figure, and a synthetic dog’s head as three kinds of remains — organic, biological, manufactured — collapsed into one visual register. Each object marks a point of entry: a trip, a market, a gift — carried across distance and quietly domesticated by use.

Other objects preside rather than merely furnish. In Power Supply, switches, a raised fist, a mask, and natural forms are arranged like specimens along a single conduit, wiring electrical current to political, religious, and superstitious authority. Technologia places a carved feline mask beside a fan switch and a plant, granting mechanical utility, aesthetic object, and biological form equal standing. Curated together, these works show how many systems of power quietly cohabit a single wall, ordinary enough to go unnoticed.

Not every object settles into its role. Juvenile captures a dog in motion, resisting the specimen-like stillness of the rest of the collection — an animal not yet fixed as an ornament, trophy, or heirloom. Looking Glass paints a horse in zebra stripes, performing an identity it does not hold, watched over by eyeglasses containing living eyes and an amber bottle standing sentinel beside it. Both works ask how readily identity is assigned — to animals, to objects, and by extension to people — once something is placed inside a collection.

The household is also where raw material is continually classified and put to use. Order arranges carved wooden and animal forms as if for taxonomy, exposing the impulse to systematize whatever we accumulate. Forest removes furniture from its architectural context and presents it as inventory — trees rendered as tables and benches, commodities once living. Climate Science turns to clothing: three coats hang like shed skins or armor, each marking a different degree of shelter from the world outside. Wood, fabric, form — nothing here is neutral; each carries a history of transformation and the human impulse to organize what surrounds us.