Meeting (2025) by Miguel Calderón comprises a chair assembled from two stacked car tires, with a backrest and a seat fashioned from recycled sections of tire. The work originated while scouting locations for a film through the northern Mexican state of Zacatecas. Driving through a series of nearly abandoned towns—places where migration has left behind only fragments of everyday life behind—Calderón encountered a tire repair shop furnished with handmade chairs constructed from discarded tires. The objects immediately resonated with the artist, recalling his childhood, when his father was a professional race car driver. This personal association revealed an inherent contradiction: “I found it contradictory that tires—objects associated with speed and precision—had been transformed into chairs. And these chairs were so comfortable that they seemed destined for the exact opposite: to sit, and to watch time go by."

Characteristic of Calderón's practice is an attention to the extraordinary within the everyday, transforming vernacular forms encountered in Mexico into works that reveal the humor, ingenuity, and poetry of ordinary life. In Meeting, the chairs become both sculpture and cultural artifact, inviting viewers to reconsider its formal qualities alongside personal and social histories it embodies. The speed and intensity associated with the automobile give way to to the stillness of sitting, transforming an improvised vernacular design into a meditation on memory, time, and the quiet poetry of the commonplace.