Reaching Purity

Artist: AQMNI (Ethel + Carlo Zafranco)
Location: Palmdale Transportation Center
39000 Clock Tower Plaza Dr. E 
Installation Date: April 2023

Our design for this project showcases a waste management worker's hand reaching for a hand that is forming out of water.  We wanted to highlight the members/workers of the community who actually perform the labor of managing our collective waste.  We chose the water element to represent our symbiotic relationship with nature and its resources.  Within the hand, we see an occurrence of osmosis that is separating paint waste from the body of water.  This is a representation of our growing awareness and efforts in doing our part to care for our planet.  Through this paint collection day, we are saving our water sources from any paint that may have found its way into contaminating our sources.  We felt that humanizing nature makes it more relatable for others to grasp the importance of taking care of our planet like we take care of our own bodies.  The moon in the background parallels the symbiotic relationship between its gravitational pull on the tides with the pulling of the paint out of water.

About the Artist

AQMNI is a husband-and-wife artist team who create custom-designed murals that tell stories through bold imaginative art pieces.  

Carlo Zafranco, the Aquarius, has a background in graphic design and animation and has worked for Disney, Marvel, and Universal, among others.  His current focus is to use his experience to empower underserved communities and BIPOC youth so they too can pave their own paths through the arts.  He also wants to develop a mentorship initiative in which interested youth can learn and get hands-on experience to further pursue a creative career path.  

Ethel Zafranco, the Gemini, was placed in a program that provided a platform for youth to express themselves creatively through arts, crafts, theater, photos, and film.  She studied fine art in high school and received her BA in multimedia arts from LMU.  Creatively, her career has taken the form of digital photography and video editing for social media content creation for e-commerce businesses.  She has since found an outlet for expressing her emotions through conceptual portraiture.  During the pandemic, she decided to bring the opportunity of expression and healing through the arts to underserved youth and communities.

After quitting their “creative” corporate jobs, they sold everything they had and packed the bare necessities into a backpack, set to travel the world.  While staying on a small organic farm on the Big Island of Hawaii, their host asked if they were up for the challenge of creating a mural in the barn.  They accepted, thus reigniting their creative drives and AQMNI was born.