STATEMENT OF WORK

I want always to be like a river; flowing through, around, over, and with. Moving between ideas, forms, and ways of making and being is essential to how I make my work. I use a variety of materials to make drawings, prints, fiber works, paintings, and sculptures, and often my works lie somewhere in between two or more of these things. I fluidly source from and weave together ancient South and Central American traditions of craft, figuration, and abstraction along with language, symbols, and craft forms from U.S. history and settler-colonial traditions. My works are both painting and textile, both craft and sculpture, both body and icon, as I substitute one material for another and combine one form with another - hybridizing processes and forms in an attempt to devour the imperialist culture under which I live and pull it into the service of the artistic lineage and traditions I’ve been denied. 

Every aspect of my life has shown me that the personal is political; they flow together and there are no boundaries. When there are figures in my work, the body - my body - often moves between glyph, ancient gold work, and the soft flesh of a drawing from my western education. Weavings of anxious encapsulated figures are made from the rope used in agricultural and landscaping labor or found at my neighborhood hardware store. Many of my works harken to flags and banners that arise from times of revolution and revolt; like the time my parents left Colombia or the summer of 2020. The works are also like fencing, net, and geographical grid, evoking capture, the division of the land, and the enmeshment of the American continents. The language in the work moves between English and Spanish as easily as I do, and is directly pulled from or references everything from idioms, political soundbites, propaganda, advertisements, family sayings, legal language, historic documents, and the history of the labor movement. The interplay between multiple meanings, connotations, and translations of words and phrases keeps the language fluid and unstable in its exact meaning - which is how I feel as I make this work in order to process issues of liberation, repression, and the weight of history.