








Remnants
Photography series, 2024
Film/Video installation (in production), 2025
Film/Video installation (in production), 2025
In the Midwest, pioneer cemeteries established in the early 19th century are among the few areas of land spared from industrial agricultural development. Alongside the human remains they memorialize, these sites have accidentally preserved remnants of the native tallgrass prairie ecosystems that once covered the region. In ecology, “remnant” is a term for sites where native plant communities have not been significantly disturbed by human development.
Cemetery sites now provide rare spaces of survival and life for nonhuman beings and communities, and hold accidental, crucial archives of a threatened ecosystem.
Through moving image, photography and installation, Remnants travels through cemetery prairie remnants in Illinois, Iowa, and Indiana to reflect on environmental and spiritual care, the nature of memory, and the land’s mythologies and degradation.
Selected Images
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Day/Dream
2023
Video, Sound, Installation
Collaboration with architect, Regina Teng





Day/Dream
2023
Video, Sound, Installation
Collaboration with architect, Regina Teng
Video, Sound, Installation
Collaboration with architect, Regina Teng
Day/Dream is a video installation based in concepts of perception, dreaming, and collectivity, designed collaboratively by artist Sara Suárez and architect Regina Teng. Day/Dream was commissioned by Materials & Applications and first presented at the M&A Storefront in Los Angeles.
As sunlight passes through lenses, bright flares and iridescence appear on nearby surfaces. These light patterns are called caustics, formed as light is bent by the curved surface of a reflective or refractive material. In architecture, the study of caustics has been limited primarily to visual effects, yet the term’s etymology derives from causticus, “to burn,” suggesting their thermal potential. Within the installation, an array of suspended Fresnel lenses works to passively cool or heat the space by mediating and redirecting sunlight, while offering inverted and magnified views of the worlds within and outside the space. This full-scale architectural model tests the thermal effects of various lens arrangements, manipulating optical logics to redefine transparency and its aesthetics within an ecologically conscious system.
At night, Day/Dream suggests an interior dreamscape made through the refraction and recombination of nighttime dreams. Ocean imagery flows throughout the space, passing through the lenses to create spectacular visual effects. Over a series of public dream-sharing gatherings hosted by Suárez, participants co-created a “reservoir” of remembered dreams: a shared archive of images, sensations, symbols, and stories collected from the surreal terrains of sleep. This dream reservoir, reexpressed through video projection, soundscapes, and voice recordings, shifts rhythmically throughout the space, mediated by the lenses to cast refracted images and waterlike patterns of light.
The composition centers and thinks with water: scarce, essential, and threatened in waking life, and a deeply resonant symbol that speaks to the fluidity of dreams and potentials of sharing resources. In a moment when our needs for liveable environments and new relationalities are increasingly urgent, this convergence of practices explores the radical, material potentials of seemingly ephemeral phenomena.
Dream Contributors
Martín Veléz, Alex the Brown, Anya Ventura, Azadeh Ahmadi, Benny Reiss, Carole Suarez, Carter Stoddard, Céline Brunko, Def Sound, Elenie Chung, Emma Stefansky, Greg Ayapantecatl, Ikechukwu Sharpe, Irene Gil-Ramon, Ivan Eduardo Rivera, Jake Jackson, Jason Livingston, Kate Yeh Chiu, laura nelson, M Woods, Mal Young, Maya Nutria, Michael Lee, Sandra Olkowski, Sean Huntley, Simona Ferrari, Simone Johnson, Trevor Byrne, Water School, Zelikha Zohra Shoja.
Related Links
Gathering Tides: A collective dream journal created in the development of Day/Dream
View collected project research
As sunlight passes through lenses, bright flares and iridescence appear on nearby surfaces. These light patterns are called caustics, formed as light is bent by the curved surface of a reflective or refractive material. In architecture, the study of caustics has been limited primarily to visual effects, yet the term’s etymology derives from causticus, “to burn,” suggesting their thermal potential. Within the installation, an array of suspended Fresnel lenses works to passively cool or heat the space by mediating and redirecting sunlight, while offering inverted and magnified views of the worlds within and outside the space. This full-scale architectural model tests the thermal effects of various lens arrangements, manipulating optical logics to redefine transparency and its aesthetics within an ecologically conscious system.
At night, Day/Dream suggests an interior dreamscape made through the refraction and recombination of nighttime dreams. Ocean imagery flows throughout the space, passing through the lenses to create spectacular visual effects. Over a series of public dream-sharing gatherings hosted by Suárez, participants co-created a “reservoir” of remembered dreams: a shared archive of images, sensations, symbols, and stories collected from the surreal terrains of sleep. This dream reservoir, reexpressed through video projection, soundscapes, and voice recordings, shifts rhythmically throughout the space, mediated by the lenses to cast refracted images and waterlike patterns of light.
The composition centers and thinks with water: scarce, essential, and threatened in waking life, and a deeply resonant symbol that speaks to the fluidity of dreams and potentials of sharing resources. In a moment when our needs for liveable environments and new relationalities are increasingly urgent, this convergence of practices explores the radical, material potentials of seemingly ephemeral phenomena.
Dream Contributors
Martín Veléz, Alex the Brown, Anya Ventura, Azadeh Ahmadi, Benny Reiss, Carole Suarez, Carter Stoddard, Céline Brunko, Def Sound, Elenie Chung, Emma Stefansky, Greg Ayapantecatl, Ikechukwu Sharpe, Irene Gil-Ramon, Ivan Eduardo Rivera, Jake Jackson, Jason Livingston, Kate Yeh Chiu, laura nelson, M Woods, Mal Young, Maya Nutria, Michael Lee, Sandra Olkowski, Sean Huntley, Simona Ferrari, Simone Johnson, Trevor Byrne, Water School, Zelikha Zohra Shoja. Related Links
Gathering Tides: A collective dream journal created in the development of Day/DreamView collected project research




Oversight
2023
Video (6 minutes)
Photography, Direction, Editing: Sara Suárez
Poem: Mal Young
Video (6 minutes)
Photography, Direction, Editing: Sara Suárez
Poem: Mal Young
Oversight pairs satellite and human landscape observations, alongside an enigmatic text passing steadily beneath the images. Parallel observers drift through downtown Los Angeles, in a silent reflection on vision, control, and “watchful care.”
Gathering Tides
2023
Text, Research, Social
Text, Research, Social
Gathering Tides is a shared dream journal created through a series of social dream-sharing workshops designed and hosted by Suárez. Across five public gatherings, the series convened groups of strangers to share, listen to, and write with their dreams together to co-create a “reservoir” of dream materials — a shared archive of images, sensations, symbols and stories drawn from the surreal terrains of sleep. The project envisions dreaming as an open, plastic space where we may reveal and cultivate radical modes of relationality, care and collective imagination.
The series was commissioned by Materials & Applications in concert with Day/Dream.
The dream journal is anonymous and open to public editing.
You are welcome to visit, read, and write in your own dreams.
visit the dream journal
view research collection
visit the dream journal
view research collection
Dream Journal Video Documentation
Watermarks
2018
Video, Film (14 minutes)
Video, Film (14 minutes)
Watermarks is an expressive study of Richmond, Virginia, where post-Civil War monuments obscure the buried traumas of enslavement along the James River. Through analog film processes and unconventional sound design, the river becomes a line to trace a history that remains invisible beneath an illusory surface. Seemingly stable landscapes unfold to unearth a buried world, observing a land polluted by histories of violence and questioning how the past has been recorded or suppressed.
14 minutes, 2018
Excerpt above; full film here
Screenings (2019-20)
Los Angeles Filmforum at MOCA
Slamdance Film Festival
Fracto Experimental Film Encounter
Iowa City Intl. Documentary Festival (ICDOCS)
Alchemy Film & Moving Image Festival
Chicago Underground Film Festival
Feminist Border Arts Film Festival
Treefort Music Festival
NOFLASH Video Show
CalArts Directing Showcase, REDCAT