Installation photograph, Carlos Rosales-Silva: Mariposa, June 27 – September 13, 2025, photo by Zachary Norman, © UMOCA

Housed in the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art’s Street Gallery, Mariposa unfolds in a corridor of curated light. Carlos Rosales-Silva’s paintings range from small, intimate works to expansive site-specific wall pieces, each alive with high-key color, bold geometry and textured surfaces. Encountered together, they feel both deeply familiar and startlingly new, rooted in cultural memory while asserting a fresh, commanding presence.

The title, Spanish for “butterfly,” is drawn from the artist’s recent visit to Santuario Piedra Herrada in Mexico, one of the final stops for the monarch butterfly migration. Every year, monarchs travel thousands of miles from Canada to Mexico, a journey that has, over decades, come to symbolize labor, resilience, and the migration of Mexican immigrants. In Rosales-Silva’s hands, the monarch becomes more than a symbol: it is a parallel for survival, endurance, and the fragility of both ecological and human systems. The connection between butterfly and border is not literal illustration, but a shared metaphor and one that bridges nature’s cyclical movement with the generational patterns of human migration.

Rosales-Silva’s surfaces carry the visual and tactile language of Mexican heritage and borderland architecture. Sharp lines, concentric circles, and repeated patterns are built up with crushed stone, glass beads and painted rocks. These materials do more than decorate, they inhabit the work. Stones collect in crevices, beads scatter across color fields, and textured passages spill over the edges of panels, breaking the boundary between the painted surface and the surrounding space.

Detail from Carlos R0sales-Silva’s “Rompido”

This attention to texture recalls adobe walls, stucco façades, and Chicano mural traditions common along the U.S. Mexico border. The materiality is both structural and symbolic: pigments and aggregates embedded into the surface mimic the way histories, traditions and resilience are embedded in communities. The colors of saturated reds, deep purples and electric cobalt blues are instantly arresting. At times they verge on the invasive, demanding the viewer’s attention; at other moments, symmetry and rhythm create a quiet, almost meditative stillness. This interplay mirrors the thematic tension at the heart of Mariposa—the urgent realities of migration and habitat loss held in balance with the enduring beauty of cultural identity.

Many works in Mariposa use their titles as direct entry points into the viewing experience. “Rompido” (“ruptured”) is built from conflicting colors and rigid, angular lines that suggest fracture—a shattered window, a fault line, a surface under strain. The tension between these sharp geometries and the lushness of the color elicits a subtle anxiety, a sense that something is on the verge of rupture.

“Sun Kiss” centers a circular form with radiating beams, descending into patterned shapes reminiscent of flames, all under a blue sky. The composition hints at the omnipresence of the sun, or perhaps an all-seeing gaze, a cosmic force linking life, migration and time. “Courtyard” draws the viewer into a defined but ambiguous space: perhaps walled, perhaps open to the sky. The inclusion of a potential plant anchors the work, while variations in texture—some surfaces lifted and rough, others smoother—suggest the interplay of cultivated and natural environments.

One of the exhibition’s most striking works, “Mariposa 4,” is patterned with a delicacy akin to embroidery. Two large, globe-like forms meet at a shared red outline, resembling two worlds colliding or two butterfly wings in perfect symmetry. The mirroring is both geometric and organic, uniting abstraction with the natural form it quietly references.

Carlos Rosales-Silva, “Courtyard”

Rosales-Silva’s works speak to the monarch’s migration not only as a natural wonder, but as an allegory for the cycles of human movement across borders. In this reading, the butterfly becomes a stand in for the laborers who travel often under dangerous conditions to sustain families, send money home and preserve connections across distance. The monarch’s decline due to habitat loss mirrors the precarity of migrant lives threatened by policy, climate change, and economic instability.

The paintings do not serve as literal protest banners, but they are charged with urgency. Their brightness draws us in; their textures slow us down; their embedded materials keep us returning to the surface, searching for meaning. In this way, Mariposa offers both a call to awareness and a space for reflection. It invites conversation about labor laws, border politics, and the cultural inheritance tied to migration, without collapsing into didacticism.

By merging ecological and human narratives, Rosales-Silva bridges two realms often treated as separate. His work resists the idea that environmental decline and human migration are unrelated issues; instead, he shows them as deeply interconnected, bound by patterns of displacement, survival, and adaptation.

Installation view with, from left, “Lagunilla,” “Semilla,” “Quilt,” and “Loose Grip,” photo by Zachary Norman, © UMOCA.

One of the most compelling aspects of Mariposa is how beauty operates not as decoration, but as a strategy. The symmetry of “Mariposa 4,” the saturated palette of “Sun Kiss,” the precision of “Rompido”—these visual pleasures pull viewers closer, making them receptive before the deeper narratives fully register. The works are inviting, but they are not comfortable. Their materiality—crushed stone, beads, pigment—insists on the physical labor of making, reinforcing the labor embedded in the stories they carry. Even the geometric structures, often precise and controlled, are “broken” by the addition of irregular textures or cascading elements. This is where Rosales-Silva’s surfaces speak most powerfully: the underlying order is never entirely smooth, just as migration ,whether by butterfly or human, is never without disruption.

Mariposa is a visual archive in motion. It holds ecological urgency, cultural memory, and personal reflection in the same frame. The monarch butterfly’s journey becomes a way of thinking about endurance about what it means to return, to travel far and still find one’s way back, to carry memory across borders. The paintings, like the migration they reference, resist a single interpretation. They operate on multiple registers: as formal abstractions, as records of heritage, as meditations on displacement, and as bridges between human and nonhuman narratives. The embedded materials, the architectural echoes, and the vivid chromatic language all work in concert to create a show that is as tactile as it is conceptual.

Installation view with, from left, “Dulce,” “Courtyard,” “Border Logic,” and “Sun Kiss 3,” photo by Zachary Norman, © UMOCA.

Carlos Rosales-Silva: Mariposa, Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, Salt Lake City, through September 13.

Nolan Flynn

Raised in a creative Michigan household, Nolan Patrick Flynn developed an early passion for art. He moved to Utah to pursue an MFA at the University of Utah and continues to create art out of his Salt Lake City studio and teach high school art at Stansbury High School.