STATEMENT OF WORK

     I want always to be like a river; flowing freely through, around, over, and with. Moving between ideas, forms, and ways of making and being is essential to how I make my work, essential to the versatility it takes to survive well. I use a variety of materials to make drawings, prints, fiber works, paintings, and sculptures, and sometimes my works lie somewhere between two or more of these things. I fluidly source from and weave together ancient South and Central American traditions of figuration, abstraction, and craft along with language, symbols, and craft from U.S. and settler-colonial traditions to make work that is as amalgam as I am, first generation American living in the heart of a dying empire. Bodies, animals, and objects are informed by attempting to imagine what kind of artist I might be if I had been raised and educated in an uncolonized South American art practice. I was trained as an artist in the United States and I now hybridize processes and forms 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.

     Through the work I grapple with having a dispossessed, working body under a capitalist system. Every aspect of my life has shown me that the personal is political; there are no boundaries between them. When there are figures, the body – my body – moves between glyph, ancient gold work, and the soft flesh of a drawing from my western education. Manic-frantic figures stumble through burning scenarios, not quite landscapes – is it fire or is it tear gas? They run in circles, they travel on the contracting and expanding line of history. Many works harken to flags and banners that arise from times of revolution or the many small uprisings and resistances that lead towards it. These 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, 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.