“As a kid, the first time I received a Maquech as a souvenir, I was struck by how cruel it felt—to see a living insect turned into jewelry. It was unsettling. And yet… the visual, the unexpected mix of life and ornament, left a mark on me. It disturbed me, but also inspired me.”  writes Georgina Treviño

In the exhibition, GARDEN, Treviño revisits this early memory with power and intention. Her work takes the tradition of the Maquech, a living beetle adorned and worn in the Yucatán, and transforms it into a conversation about control, beauty, and discomfort. The resulting pieces are full of contradiction: glittering, raw, defiant, and hauntingly alive.

Drawing from her borderland roots between San Diego and Tijuana, Treviño’s jewelry is a blend of street glam, ancestral knowledge, and personal narrative. She turns materials and memories into talismans—unapologetically bold and culturally layered. Her Maquech is no longer crawling on a lapel, but seared into the imagination—part protest, part adornment, part myth.

In the Los Maquecheros Pins that memory hardens into a carapace. Built from a plastic insect, resin, sterling silver, and found jewelry, the work doesn’t mimic nature so much as test our appetite for it—how we bind, stage, and desire the living.

Across the room, Spill’d Tea  sits in the exhibition like a compost heap that learned to sparkle. Treviño takes a domestic vessel—the tool of steeping, sharing, gossip—and lets it accrue the sediment of a life in adornment: chains, pearls, tags, watch faces, safety pins, rhinestones, tiny portraits. Black resin binds the whole into a new geology, a dark soil from which bright fragments emerge like seeds after rain.
 

If much of GARDEN dwells on nature’s forms, these works insist on nature’s behaviors: accumulation, grafting, and propagation. Each salvaged part is a volunteer plant, migrating from drawer to body to object; together they make a social ecology where ornament is pollination and conversation is climate. Read side by side, the pin and the tea set are both talisman and midden—archives of what was once precious, reactivated through care and time. They are the trellis rather than the bloom, the infrastructure that lets stories climb.