In a pink, glowing Rococo setting, Yvette Mayorga’s first solo exhibition in Mexico dives into nostalgia, teenage dreams, and how sometimes a sugary coating can conceal crucial truths.

For La Jaula de Oro—The Golden Cage—at Museo de Arte de Zapopan, the Chicago-based artist (previously) has created four acrylic-piped paintings on canvas and a series of mixed-media sculptures. These include a 1974 Datsun coated in crochet, plush and plastic toys, acrylic nails, faux fur, rosaries, and other ephemera. Pop singer Selena’s song “Dreaming of You” wafts from the car stereo.

At first glance, Mayorga’s compositions appear like delicate, frosted confections, glittering with nail charms and predominantly made in various shades of pink. But upon closer inspection, reminders of a slightly more unsettling reality begin to emerge, such as scorpions, clocks, or mirrors—nods to our relationship with time, others, and our mortality.

The artist draws on the tradition of vanitas painting, a style popularized during the Dutch Golden Age, often in the form of still lifes brimming with visual cues that power and glory mean nothing when confronted with the inevitability of death.

For Mayorga, the supple forms of piped bows, rosettes, and borders belie important messages centered around border control, immigrant labor, rampant capitalism, and pop culture.

Akin to the way cookies or cakes are created to be literally consumed, the artist toys with the notion of fleetingness. “La princesa (Ride or Die),” for example, captures a sense of ephemerality and impermanence: “here today and gone tomorrow,” says curator Maya Renée Escárcega.

The artist invites viewers into a seemingly carefree, saccharine space evocative of the opulence of the late 18th century—the era of Marie Antoinette and her famous—if mythical—quote: “Let them eat cake.” Considered the “Rococo Queen,” she is associated with luxury and frivolity, and she came to symbolize the excesses of the wealthy during a period when many people couldn’t afford bread, let alone the delicacies of cake.

Mayorga’s primary medium is acrylic applied using a pastry bag. She references women workers—especially women of color—from whom colonial discourse stripped notions of femininity assigned to white women. She expands upon the framework of Rococo to analyze 21st-century issues, simultaneously serving us a reminder of the sacrifices and toil required to produce what capitalist society consumes.

La Jaula de Oro and continues in Zapopan through January 5. Find more on Mayorga’s website and Instagram.