From the Series Healing Tool, Reliquary Figure, 31”x41”, archival inkjet print, exhibition view, April 15 to May 14, 2026, OMA (Orlando Museum of Art). Photo © Alian Rives' Studio
“Echoes of the Ancient in Contemporary Voices,”  at Orlando Art Museum, invites artists to re-engage with the Art of the Ancient Americas through the lens of personal heritage, ancestral knowledge, and cultural continuity. How can storytelling, ritual, craft, and memory reconnect us to the sacred or symbolic power that the belongings in this collection once held? How do contemporary practices reclaim or reframe their meaning for today’s world? From the Series Healing Tool, Reliquary Figure actively engages with the American Museum’s collection of tribal artifacts from the Ancient Americas, examining how institutional display transforms sacred objects. In this photograph, I capture a vitrined reliquary figure and its wall label from the Lowe Art Museum, then digitally remove the object using Photoshop’s spot healing brush. This process leaves only the empty glass box and the textual trace of its existence. I embedded a QR code in the image, linking it to a digital archive with partial details of the erased object, prompting viewers to bridge the gap between absence and presence through active interpretation.I incorporate traditional forms by re-scaling the printed photograph to match the artifact’s dimensions and layering its presentation to echo the stratified display of museum vitrines. Caribbean and Latin American narratives of inheritance, displacement, survival, and cultural reclamation shape my creative process. By visualizing absence, I reawaken the cultural presence of the reliquary figure, not by physically restoring it, but by restoring the conversation around its meaning, function, and rightful place. I challenge audiences to confront the shifting “aura” of such artifacts as they move from ritual value to exhibition value, and I urge viewers to consider preservation, restitution, and cultural stewardship.