In a thrift store window in San Francisco in 2013, a blue plastic flip-flop with a kitten heel and slender straps lay nestled among piles of trinkets. It caught Cella’s eye. Twelve years later, that ordinary object lives on as the stone sculpture before you, as part of Cella’s reflection on myth, consumerism, and time.

Drawing from an Aztec folklore of a two-headed snake, Cella reimagines this deity of cyclical time as a mass-produced sandal. She fused two opposing worlds into conversation: one shaped by urgency, disposability of the now, and one anchored in the endurance of the past. The act of stone carving becomes a form of resistance, like turning a flip-flop into cornerstones in the time cycle. She responds to a culture that moves too fast and forgets too easily.

However, for Cella it’s never necessary to add sorrow to a world already full of heartbreak. Instead, she carves with a sense of playfulness and a belief in beauty.

Cella creates a permanence by carving stone, but even this permanence is conditional. Like the original sandal, the memory of the object may erode with time. She imagines a future viewer stumbling upon these sculptures and mistaking them for sacred relics, completely unaware of their mass-produced origins. This misread isn’t false; it’s the intention. Cella recalls the “inherently flawed” in archaeology and anthropology, where objects are shaped by shifting interpretations, and she mirrors that speculative logic. By planting these false artifacts, she plays with the gap between the known, the guessed, and the truth.

What we saw at Cella’s studio was unfinished, but that form might appear again as things waer off. When she sands down its surface, those uneven abrasions could come back as time pass. Eventually, what’s left? When decay takes place on this sculpture, is time drifting toward the snake’s head, or its tail?