Sara Mehrinfar & Stacey Calle
Willed to be
May 2 - May 24, 2026
On a sunny afternoon, I sit across the table from Sara Mehrinfar and Stacey Calle in the housemates’ Mid-city backyard. The two artists, both graduates of Otis College of Art and Design, introduce me to the book Space and Place, by Yi-Fu Tuan, the late Chinese-American geographer. Tuan writes about how our embodied experience organizes space, imbuing it with a meaning ultimately derived from our experience of home. In the driveway behind the artists is a table piled with old loaves of bread. Calle explains that he’s been collecting these loaves from the bakery where he works.
Mehrinfar and Calle’s ideas of home have been fundamentally shaped by their upbringings as immigrants/children of immigrants from Argentina and Iran, and Ecuador, respectively. These experiences have in turn shaped the artists’ new collaborative exhibition, Willed to be, on view for the first time at Monte Vista Projects. The title of the exhibition is a riff on the idiom “to will into existence,” intended to reflect on our ability—and the limits of our ability—to exert control over ourselves, our homes, and our realities more broadly.
In Willed to be, Mehrinfar and Calle organize the gallery floor using four rectangular plots of different dimensions. Each plot has been constructed with meticulously poured plain flour (a nod to Calle’s occupation as a baker, and a frequent ingredient in his artistic practice). Above these plots are a number of rectangular planes hung horizontally from the ceiling at varying heights. Each is made of blue glass except one: a window screen. On some of these flour plots and glass planes sit bread loaves shaped like houses. Another long rectangular plot is decorated with halved, bolillo-sized loaves, giving the impression of a cobblestone street.
Bread is a symbol of the body—both the human and the divine. But not all bread contains this symbolic power. The early European colonists in the Americas believed that only wheat flour bread was healthy and constituted the true body of Christ. The natives’ maize gave the colonists weak constitutions and, they argued, could not be transubstantiated into the body of Christ. Thus, they sowed the land with wheat and other Old World crops and paved the streets with cobblestones. They declared wheat bread the one true bread.
Home, according to Tuan, is a place of security where our biological needs are met, where flour is turned into bread. But what is home when the foundation of diet itself can be weaponized as a form of colonial control?
I’m struck by the installation’s focus on form, which recalls the austerity of minimalism while complicating its traditional power dynamic. Classic works of minimalism, often constructed from steel or wood or from the earth itself, impose upon the viewer’s body. But here, the opposite is true: the striking delicacy of these flour forms can make a viewer feel like they’re the one imposing upon the objects, as if too quick of a step might damage a flour plot, or an errant movement of the arm might disturb the hanging glass.
But the power dynamics in Willed to be are not so simple. The blue of the glass planes is a reference to the blue hue that objects take on when viewed from a great distance. Taken together, these planes create a palimpsest of overlapping forms. They intimate another view of the artwork that we might achieve if only we could take it in at a greater distance and from above. But of course, we cannot achieve such a view. We as the viewer can only witness these forms from the side, from eye level. Thus, here we find ourselves again caught in a bind.
Just as Willed to be complicates the concept of home and our ability to control it, the formal elements of the installation challenge our sense of control more broadly: while we might feel like gods towering above the flour plots and tiny bread houses neatly contained within the gallery, there is always a view that is higher, more synoptic, bluer. It is here, in the in between, that we must toil, never fully in control of ourselves, our lives, or our realities.
—Daniel Tovar
