Artist Statement
"I sit between warmth and cold never knowing which is my territory..."
Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera
My work explores personal, cultural, and ancestral memory. Rooted in the practice of drawing and painting, it is figurative and personal. I wish to imagine and activate new realities through narrative. My family stories—mythic, imagined, or real—are source material by which I explore the intersection of craft and material, intuition and intention. My work asks, to what visual tradition do I belong? Ní de aquí, ní de alla.
Content and color is informed by my bicultural and bilingual identity. I am critically aware that my choices in conventions of form and space, which is to say the visual language I am always trying to find, are loaded with cultural context and meaning. So I choose deliberately and consciously. This is true of my material choices, as well. Whether I am working in paint, vinyl or steel, I work to transform the material into an shared visual and tactile experience.
Hybridity, magic, folklore and ritual are my inspiration. The plaintive sits beside the mystical. I see this nepantla, or tierra en medio, as a space of consciousness and infinite possibilities.