Rolling down the highway again, I’m thinking that this go-around, I wasn’t so jarred
by the passing of time. 
The trees were still shaking green & you know, the light was still hot & new
but my mother had beheaded the giant sunflower
that had been blooming the month before
& had left her brown in the back, full of seeds for me to take.

Whenever it is that I finally decide to floss, 
I’ll have to bleach my gummy blood out of the sink. 
The student dentist once told me 
that it’s negligence that’s expensive.
She was so perky & funny, familiar
like a fellow young person bored 
at a family gathering, stretching against her tights. 
The man supervising her said to come back when I have a job that gives me insurance. 

I get exhausted realizing 
who I am over & over again.

When my mom was on the phone 
with “technically her sister” in Guatemala &
scrubbing the dishwasher, casually 
talking about her trauma, I felt
like a little pussy bitch because I hadn’t survived anything. 
I didn’t text you about it because I know you 
wouldn’t know what to say. 
She flicked on the burner, didn’t meet my gaze 
& she said “That is my tragedy! Ja-ja.”
I told our friends about it, in front of you, 
pouring her accent down my mouth & all the hair stuck inside of it.

Next time, on our way back home, 
what if we went to go see
the large ball of rubber bands
Jess is always talking about? 
I don’t even know if it’s real, but
you could take a picture of me 
anyway, with my hands against it,
pushing & pushing.

Published January 30, 2022

Melissa Lozada-Oliva is the author of Dreaming of You (Astra House 2021). She hosts the podcast Say More with Olivia Gatwood and sings in a band called Meli and the Specs. She has been featured in BBC Mundo, Vogue, NPR, the Yale Review, Oprah Daily, Vulture, and more. 

Hugo Lami’s work peers into the digital and virtual absurdity of contemporary culture, evoking our social dependency on technological devices and social media. His paintings portray editable environments of 3D construction software, with the purpose of re-embodying virtual tools. The sculptures and installations, on the other hand, investigate the hardware of our technological evolution and by fusing concepts and objects, while displacing them in time, the works create innovative narratives of possible Utopian and Dystopian futures that could quite easily become a reality. Lami says: ‘I love technology, but I also hate it. Every new device gives me hope that maybe that’s the one that is going to change my life. It never is.’ Hugo's work unfolds into painting, sculpture, multimedia installation, performance, and most recently into Digital art through means of an Augmented Reality App that expands the paintings as virtual sculpture. Hugo Lami has a Masters in Sculpture from the Royal College of Art and a Degree in Painting from the Lisbon Fine Arts Academy. Lami has been exhibiting in galleries and institutional spaces across Europe since 2014. He was awarded the Public’s Choice Award at VIA Arts Prize, London, 2019, and made his first public sculpture in 2018 in Ermioni, Greece. In 2020 he was an Artist in Residence at the Muse at 269 in London and worked in a commission for the organisation Sustainability First. His next exhibition will be ‘No Reino da Nuvens’ in May at the Museum MU.SA in Sintra and ‘Re-connect’ in June at Bermondsey Project Space commissioned by UK Power Networks in London. The Neon Gallery are proud to say that Hugo Lami was the irrefutable winner of the 2021 Neon Gallery Art Award. Next month, Hugo will be exhibiting with the Neon Gallery at Zona Maco, one of Mexico's most prominent art fairs. Zona Maco Arte Contemporáneo will take place at Centro Banamex, Mexico City from February 9-13. You can find more of his work online through the Neon Gallery.