Oakland resident Caleb Duarte is a part of a new generation of Bay Area Chicano artists. As an artist, he works with a combination of found materials, architectural building supplies, painting and drawing to create temporary installations and “sculptural paintings” that evoke poignant narratives of home, shelter and displacement. Spark follows Duarte as he prepares for his first solo exhibition in San Francisco.

The theme of home and shelter is central to Duarte’s work. Influenced by an interest in architecture and various forms of dwellings, Duarte uncovers how our living spaces speak to our realities and our relative placement in the so-called first and third worlds. His work explores what our homes say about the truth of our lives and the widening gap between rich and poor in the contemporary global context.

To create the temporary structures used in his installations, Duarte collects driftwood, old signs and other found materials that have had an existence as natural objects or in human habitats before he reuses them. It’s important to him that these materials are imperfect, that they have had a life that predates his own involvement with them. This use of weathered materials expands the narrative implications of his work, evoking a sense of the past and of lived histories.

Spark documents the progression of Duarte’s exhibition at Jack Fisher Gallery in San Francisco. The show, “Cuartitos” (“Little Rooms”), was inspired by the shantytowns of Mexico, and the beauty and sadness of these neighborhoods that are largely built out of necessity. These towns are constructed from whatever materials are available — combinations of cement blocks, recycled wood and old signs. Duarte’s own grandfather lived near the border town of Nogales, Mexico, where he built a cluster of makeshift houses for people to rent. On a recent road trip through Mexico, Duarte realized the profound influence his grandfather’s endeavors have had on his own work as an artist.

For his exhibition, in addition to a central towerlike form made of driftwood, Duarte fills the gallery space with sculptural wall paintings. To make these three-dimensional pieces, the artist delicately paints figures onto drywall from images he finds in newspapers and magazines, then mounts the images on boards. Some of the images were taken from newspaper articles on the disaster of Hurricane Katrina, others come from random photographs that convey a specific mood. By taking the figures out of their original context, Duarte’s representations remain ambiguous but ever imbued with emotion and humanity.

Duarte creates intimate spaces that impart a sense of humanity’s search for meaning, family, placement and home. The temporary aspect of his installations reflects the cyclical nature of life and the way in which the built environment is constructed and destroyed over and over again. By making changeable and evolving structures, Duarte evokes a ubiquitous aspect of our existence, which, alongside the inclusion of the figures, points to the beauty of human yearning.

Born in 1977, Caleb Duarte migrated from Mexico to the farm communities of the Central Valley of California when he was 4 years old. He began painting at a young age, then went on to attend the San Francisco Art Institute, where he earned a B.F.A. in 2003.

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