My practice questions and studies the visual language of desire and the body. I use the erotic as a lens to explore gender roles and the negotiations of power that occur at both the personal and the larger cultural levels. I yolk together my lived experience as a queer latine, symbols from art history, fantasies, and references to punk, kink, and feminist subcultures through material exploration. I use charcoal, oil pigment and ink in tandem with steel, leather, lipstick and silicone as a way to agitate a traditional hierarchy of materials and to create analogues for the world around us. The artworks serve as love letters, diary entries, and sexts to or between lovers.
At first, the work allures—by its content, scale, and sensual qualities— and then, a moment later, it challenges the viewer to consider their own position (physically and conceptually). I’m drawn to objects that can bait energy. My question is: can an artwork conjure sensations of both pleasure and pain? And, what does it mean to hold both of these feelings in a body?
Formally, the work deviates the boundaries of drawing, painting, and sculpture to spread open the rigid containers of western art history. Artworks serve as amalgamations of histories and speakers of multiple truths, rather than monoliths. This ethos transgresses some of the patriarchal and racist ideals of the western art canon. One of the core strategies of colonization is enforcing rigorous taxonomies—forcing people, objects, actions into specific containers in order to monitor and control them. One of my principal values as an artist is to mistrust these classifications, in both my personal life, and in my practice.