AAAgent presents Past Time, a multi-dimensional installation by Maryrose Cobarrubias Mendoza behind a succession of three doors along the corridor of Commonwealth and Council. Mendoza's visual language often plays with scale shift and materiality, and in this site-responsive work, the viewer is first placed at the vantage point of a neighbor observing the exterior of an archetypal one-story, single-family Southern California home from across the street. Crafted at a child's-eye view, the perspective can bestow a feeling of gigantism in normal-sized adult viewers. Collaged and sculpted with wire, cloth, paper, and wood, Mendoza’s bas-relief tableaux examine her childhood home through its socio-economic indicators.

The second door welcomes the viewer to the interior of the home from the standpoint of the entryway to an early 70s time capsule of space-age appliances, family-style decor, and other upwardly middle-class signifiers. We are immersed in both utter familiarity and curiosity about what transpires within. Every home, after all, contains insight into an alternate universe. Textures rise from surfaces, more objects solidify, flourishing in volume and tactility. The past reasserts itself with specificity of details, conveying reflections on immigrant aspirations, the ongoing (not always civil) conversation between assimilation and acculturation, and clues to revealing who we are to ourselves. We exist with these objects, touch them, manipulate them, lose and find them again. We play on the rugs, intimate with their wend; crawl along the floorboards, until we can simply walk by ignoring their scuffs and scars; we play dad's records, for a time, unironically.

By the time we encounter the third door, passing into that inner sanctum of childhood—“the girls’ room”—reality is fully lived, and solid enough to make the journey into the future. Mendoza processes the past by molding memories “from where it all began” into tableaux that bend the arc to the present moment into a completed circle.

—Tré Giles

Maryrose Cobarrubias Mendoza (b.1966, Manila; lives and works in Los Angeles) received an MFA from Claremont Graduate University (1991) and a BA from California State University, Los Angeles (1988). Mendoza is faculty at Pasadena City College. Selected solo exhibitions have been held at Orange County Museum of Art, Santa Ana (2020); HudsonJones Gallery, Cincinnati (2018); Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles (2015); SolwayJones Gallery, Los Angeles (2006); and YYZ Gallery, Toronto (1999). Selected group exhibitions have been held at Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art, Las Vegas (2025); Lubeznik Center for the Arts, Michigan City (2025); Craft Contemporary, Los Angeles (2025); AHL Foundation, New York (2023); Redline Contemporary Art Center, Denver (2021); W. Keith & Janet Kellogg University Art Gallery, Pomona (2019); and SOMArts, San Francisco (2007). Mendoza is a recipient of California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Artists (2025), John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (2019), City of Los Angeles Individual Artist Fellowship (2012), and Art Matters Foundation Grant (1995). Mendoza has participated in residencies at Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito (2026); Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Amherst (2025); Elizabeth Murray Artist Residency, Granville (2023); Joshua Tree Highlands Artist Residency (2017); and Yaddo Artist Residency, Saratoga Springs (2003).