HOUSTON, TX.- This summer, Houston Center for Contemporary Craft presents La Fuente del Deseo (The Fountain of Desire), the first, institutional solo exhibition of work by Georgina Treviño, an interdisciplinary artist and metalsmith from Tijuana, Mexico, based in San Diego, California. Treviño’s expansive approach to adornment combines art jewelry and sculptural traditions with the vernacular material culture, architecture, and norteño music of the Mexico-United States border. The artist occupies a radical peripheral space, both in regional perspective and artistic discipline, which allows her to deftly traverse various realms of creative production, ranging from cast-silver jewelry and tableware to custom wearables for celebrities and industrially scaled sculpture. Her oeuvre is centered on transforming everyday scenes of the world around her--from the hand-painted signs of joyerías and carnitas ricas trucks to the chewing gum covering the border wall and glinting pennies resting at the bottom of plaza fountains--into jewelry-inflected works of art.

La Fuente del Deseo presents Treviño’s wide-ranging sculptural practice within three architectural installations: the pawn shop, the playground, and the plaza. This experiential framework immerses visitors in the artist’s visionary world and source materials. Iconic jewelry pieces, including the Ms. Honey door-knocker earrings worn by Beyoncé in her groundbreaking Renaissance visual album, and the red ski mask dripping with gemstones and silver chains worn by Bad Bunny for his Rolling Stone cover issue, are featured alongside handwrought cast-silver works within the pawn-shop installation, while her monumental, Siéntase Señora nameplate-necklace bench and swing sets, emblazoned with early 2000s norteño song lyrics, are the focus of the playground installation.

The exhibition's title is derived from the massive jewel-encrusted fountain at the heart of Treviño's newest body of work, showcased within the plaza installation. This functional, three-tiered water fountain, presented alongside a penny-press machine, invites the public to become part of Treviño’s cultural production. By churning pennies through the sculpture, visitors are able to flatten and emboss her custom graphics onto the coins. The souvenir coins, sporting aspirational phrases like Ven Dinero and Yo puedo más que tú, can then be collected or cast into the central fountain’s pool in exchange for a wish. Treviño has completely encased her “fountain of desire” in found and discarded jewelry objects to produce a gleaming mosaic that visually reverberates due to its undulating reflective surfaces.

La Fuente del Deseo extends Treviño’s material investigation of adornment as a conceptual and physical site of personal history and cultural identity by transforming traditionally intimate, personalized jewelry into public monuments and sites of convening.

Georgina Treviño: La Fuente del Deseo is curated by HCCC Curator & Exhibitions Director, Sarah Darro.

Georgina Treviño is a contemporary artist and jeweler from Tijuana, Mexico, based in San Diego, California. In 2004, she earned a BA in applied design with an emphasis in jewelry and metalsmithing from San Diego State University. Treviño’s work has been acquired by the permanent collections of the Museum of Arts and Design (New York, NY), the Racine Art Museum (Racine, WI), Alain Servais Collection (Brussels, BA), and Jorge M. Pérez Collection (PAMM Museum, Miami, FL). Her work has been included in national & international exhibitions at institutions including Embajada Gallery (San Juan, Puerto Rico); VETA Galeria (Madrid, Spain); Museum JAN (Amsterdam, NL); Mingei International Museum (San Diego, CA); CECUT Tijuana Cultural Center (Tijuana, Mexico); Universidad Autónoma de Ciudad Juárez (Ciudad Juárez, Mexico); Rubin Center for the Visual Arts (El Paso, TX); Museum of Arts and Design (New York, NY); Racine Art Museum (Racine, WI); Schmuck 2015 Munich Jewelry Week; New York City Jewelry Week; and Salon Cosa Mexico City. Treviño’s practice has been featured in publications including the L.A. Times, Elle, Vogue, Architectural Digest, Allure, Marie Claire, The Fader, Paper Magazine, PlayBoy magazine, and Office Mag. She has also worked directly with celebrities like Beyoncé, Lady Gaga, Bad Bunny, Rosalia, 2Chainz, Bella Hadid, Lizzo, Doja Cat, Post Malone, Kali Uchis, Karol G, and companies like Nike®, e.l.f. Cosmetics, Bimba y Lola, Fenty, Guess, and Spotify on custom work and collaborations.