---
title: "The phone is paper, the payphone sticks out of the painting"
locale: "en"
url: "https://irz.fr/en/articles/estefania-ajcip-folded-memories-en"
markdown_url: "https://irz.fr/en/articles/estefania-ajcip-folded-memories-en.md"
category: "creative"
tags: ["art", "painting", "sculpture", "Estefania-Ajcip", "Guatemala"]
published_at: "2026-08-24T21:30:00.000Z"
author: "Hugo Marchal"
translation: "https://irz.fr/fr/articles/estefania-ajcip-folded-memories-fr.md"
---

# The phone is paper, the payphone sticks out of the painting

In Folded Memories, Estefania Ajcip builds her childhood memories in three dimensions: cardboard maquettes, carved foam, birch plywood and small LEDs. The frame stops closing the scene.

The bus is blue, it answers to the name Chillona, and its destination sign reads "Guate/L.A.". In a normal painting, the whole vehicle would live inside the paint, but here the front of the bus, the two hands nearly touching behind the windshield, a quetzal in mid-flight and a passenger at the rear door all stick out of the panel: the painting stops, the bus keeps going.

Titled “Four paths/Two paths?”, the piece runs thirteen inches deep, and it belongs to *Folded Memories*, Estefania Ajcip's first exhibition with Los Angeles's Charlie James Gallery, on view from July 10 to August 22, 2026.[1](https://www.cjamesgallery.com/exhibitions/foldedmemories) The show has just closed, and it is worth reopening here, because the way these works are built says something precise about how a memory can be constructed.

Ajcip was born in 1991 in East Los Angeles and grew up in Guatemala while her father worked in California.[1](https://www.cjamesgallery.com/exhibitions/foldedmemories) The separation lasted years, and the series works through it from the far side: the gallery's statement notes that father and daughter are close again, and that the work on abandonment happens from that place of reunification.[1](https://www.cjamesgallery.com/exhibitions/foldedmemories)

## Paint, then fold

Her method starts far from the brush: first come small cardboard models small cardboard models to work out the structure of each scene. These get scaled up into surfaces made of carved foam and thin birch plywood, with papier-mâché for the more organic shapes. The surfaces are then painted in acrylic, and many of the pieces carry small LED lights as well.[1](https://www.cjamesgallery.com/exhibitions/foldedmemories)

> The production chain
> **From cardboard to painted volume**
> - Small cardboard models to settle the architecture of the scene.: 1
> - Scaled up into carved foam and thin birch plywood.: 2
> - Papier-mâché for organic shapes, then acrylic paint.: 3
> - Small LED lights added to deepen the dreamlike feel.: 4
> Based on the Charlie James Gallery press release.

In two words, the gallery sums up the resulting armatures: light yet solid.[1](https://www.cjamesgallery.com/exhibitions/foldedmemories) The finished works stay sculptural while remaining, in the statement's phrasing, unmistakably painterly.

Seen from a distance, the sequence looks closer to an architect's model shop than to easel painting. Perspective is first laid down in two dimensions, then deliberately broken: sculpted elements push out of the surface as if the picture had given way at a chosen spot.[1](https://www.cjamesgallery.com/exhibitions/foldedmemories)

That is the core move of the series: the frame stops closing the scene and becomes a border that certain objects are allowed to cross.

## The father in the doorway

The content tells you what the form was preparing for.

In *Back to One*, the centerpiece, a patterned sofa stretches across the composition and keeps going in three dimensions past the right edge of the frame. A woman lies curled on it: the artist as an adult, inserted into a childhood memory of the family home in East LA. The gallery calls her presence a kind of corrective, a physical way of wanting to change what happened. In the doorway, a male silhouette watches the scene: her father.[1](https://www.cjamesgallery.com/exhibitions/foldedmemories)

> Illustration: Diptych in which a patterned sofa leaves the painted surface to become volume, a woman asleep on the cushions and a man's silhouette in a doorway. “Back to One” (2026): the sofa crosses from flat to volume, the adult artist joins the memory, and her father's silhouette fills the door. Credit: [Estefania Ajcip, photo Yubo Dong / ofstudio, courtesy of the artist and Charlie James Gallery](https://www.cjamesgallery.com/exhibitions/foldedmemories).

The father runs through the whole show as an absence: in *To the last use*, his figure appears in the mirror of a wardrobe bought with the money he sent home.[1](https://www.cjamesgallery.com/exhibitions/foldedmemories) In *Telephone game*, he waits at the other end of the line, standing at a Los Angeles payphone that juts out of the painted panel, while the child holds a paper phone connected by a piece of string.[1](https://www.cjamesgallery.com/exhibitions/foldedmemories) [2](https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2026/08/estefania-ajcip-sculpture-paintings-folded-memories/)

> Illustration: Sculptural painting in two panels: a child holds a paper phone to her ear while a man waits at a three-dimensional payphone, between Guatemala and Los Angeles signs. “Telephone game” (2026): the child's phone is paper, the father's payphone leaves the picture plane. Credit: [Estefania Ajcip, photo Yubo Dong / ofstudio, courtesy of the artist and Charlie James Gallery](https://www.cjamesgallery.com/exhibitions/foldedmemories).

Back at the cover, the bus closes the loop: it carries the portraits of the artist and her father along the route between Guatemala and Los Angeles, led by the quetzal, Guatemala's national bird, which the statement reads as a symbol of the family unity she longed for as a child.[1](https://www.cjamesgallery.com/exhibitions/foldedmemories)

## What the angle hides

What matters most in the device never shows up in a photo: Colossal notes that across these pieces, details are revealed or concealed depending on the viewer's perspective.[2](https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2026/08/estefania-ajcip-sculpture-paintings-folded-memories/) You have to move in front of the work to assemble the full scene; what the bus window hides head-on becomes visible from three quarters, and the door gives up what it conceals once you step aside.

A family photo is a fixed point of view, and these pieces work the other way, since they require a moving body: the memory is not shown in one block, it gets walked through, which is closer to how remembering actually feels. Depth, measured in inches on the work lists, serves the story and not just the scenery.

The raw material stays humble, since Ajcip often starts from old family photos, pulls a scene or an object out of the house, then pushes the whole thing into a dreamlike register.[1](https://www.cjamesgallery.com/exhibitions/foldedmemories) [2](https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2026/08/estefania-ajcip-sculpture-paintings-folded-memories/) The move into volume turns that document into a space you could step into, dead angles included.

## Light, but solid

None of the manufacturing constraints is a technical footnote: everything is designed for wall mounting, hence foam and thin plywood instead of a proper timber frame. The LEDs, for their part, pull the scenes toward dreams rather than historical reenactment.[1](https://www.cjamesgallery.com/exhibitions/foldedmemories) Each material choice states what the piece should be: present in the viewer's space, without claiming to replace the real memory.

Nor did this logic start with the series: a 2025 piece, *Two Faces*, already in foam, plywood and acrylic, hangs in the show.[1](https://www.cjamesgallery.com/exhibitions/foldedmemories) Ajcip studied at Pasadena City College, where she began working with alternative media, before earning her B.F.A. in drawing and painting at Cal State Long Beach, and painting remains the backbone that the volume grew onto.[1](https://www.cjamesgallery.com/exhibitions/foldedmemories)

What the series shows at its most useful lives in the making: a memory is treated there as neither an image nor a text, but as an object with an armature, its weight limits, its blind spots, its tiny LED circuits. Ajcip does not paint her memories; she builds their maquettes, then moves in.

## References

1. [Charlie James Gallery, Estefania Ajcip — Folded Memories, press release and selected works, 2026](https://www.cjamesgallery.com/exhibitions/foldedmemories)
2. [Colossal, Grace Ebert — Estefania Ajcip's Sculptural Paintings Unite the Memories of a Separated Family, August 22, 2026](https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2026/08/estefania-ajcip-sculpture-paintings-folded-memories/)