The San Antonio featured artist painted these canvases, filmed them, then tore the footage apart. Both versions share one wall.
Gallery · San AntonioOct 12, 2026
“The biggest comment I get is, oh, I like the colors,” Ursula Zavala says. “And I’m like, me too. That’s why I chose them.”
That is the front door of her work. The paintings in the San Antonio featured gallery are loud in the best way. Pink against teal. Checkerboards under brushwork. A copper sun. Stand close and the strokes look like they were made fast and happy. Then talk to her for five minutes.
“A lot of it seems very cheerful and colorful and happy, and then you talk to me about it and you realize, oh, maybe it’s not that cheerful.”
Built online, hung on a wall
Zavala was born and raised on the South Side of San Antonio and still lives on the Southwest Side. She works under the name acidwinzip, handed to her by an internet name generator in 2016, back when she was making album covers for a corner of the internet called vaporwave. The checkerboards and grids in these paintings come from there. “I can’t run away from it,” she says. “Even if I go a few years without making anything that looks like what I used to make, it’ll come back.”
She paints, prints, sews and collages. Her first solo show, It’s Not Fun Anymore, was soft sculpture, quilts, emojis and fruit still lifes. She co-founded Not For You Gallery at the Blue Star Arts Complex with Edward Perez, and she is a 2025 San Antonio grant recipient.
The wall: the paintings on either side, the broken digital version in the middle.Up close, the strokes look fast and happy.The checkerboard is a holdover from her internet years. She cannot escape it.Install day, April 2026.Ursula Zavala, Hopscotch San Antonio.
Then she destroyed them
For Hopscotch she wanted motion. She painted the canvases, shot phone video moving across them, then opened After Effects and took the footage apart. Displacement maps. Corruption. Glitches. The image falling to pieces. “I know it sounds upsetting, but it was relaxing to rip it apart. Meditative, in a way.” Then she stitched the pieces back together into the projection that plays beside the paintings.
In destruction, you can create something completely new.
The point of hanging both is simple. “A lot of us exist online. A lot of people see art online.” So here is the painting, and here is what the painting looks like after the internet gets hold of it. Same wall. You decide which one is the original.
What she hopes you do
Look at everything and fail. “I want that feeling of, I want to look at everything, but I can’t.” Lean in. Find the little text emojis. Notice where the video is eating a painting you just stood in front of.
“San Antonio has this little artsy, creative side that is a little out there,” she says. “I’m more than willing to provide that.”
Her own review, after the install: “This is such an Ursula show.”
Her show closes Tuesday, October 13. The San Antonio featured gallery changes hands in November.
