~Artist statement~

I move through my days making. I make clothes, food, furniture, jewelry, and I grow flowers to prepare for the changing of the seasons and for personally significant dates and holidays. Cycles of time are intimately woven through my labor. 

Growing up in a large-small-town in rural México, this was how most things happened, they had to be made. In everything from day-to-day basic needs to the yearly and once in a lifetime events there was a certain degree of labor: preparing, nurturing, maintaining, repairing, improving, and the act of performing the rituals. Now, making has become a weird luxury of time and resources, and not a practical living approach at all.  

This attitude towards life with its dynamics and implications are present in my artwork through the act of arranging. Arranging serves as a kind of sketching practice that allows me to identify formal and conceptual relationships. I like to think about the human impulse to transform our living spaces even though it may very well detract from functionality. I put together found and upcycled objects and materials, and imagery sourced from memory to create still-life like sculptural objects suggesting domestic interiors and garden spaces. These sculptural objects are open, and their components remain largely distinguishable and unchanged. Setting up these conditions allows me to discover unintended narratives which I can further develop and refine through the application of craft and decoration techniques, and color. I favor discarded materials such as old bricks, rocks, broken pots, fallen tree branches, and repurposed wood, and enjoy treating them with great importance. I like to think about and acknowledge the function and importance these materials once had and how to honor them once again anew.  

Subverting the ‘normal’ roles of objects and materials speaks to my playful nature and allows me to express my own identity. Having immigrated to the USA in my early teens, and at current living in the American Midwest, thoughts of home, belonging and identity are ever present in my life. My mind has become a fusing of various cultural practical and aesthetic impressions derived from living experience but also from my consumption of entertainment media such as ecology and anthropology documentaries, classic Japanese and Mexican cinema, traditional world dance and music, and anime. I think this to also be the case for most people as the world has become increasingly migratory and more readily connected, and perhaps even more so for the anime subculture. In anime, many worlds exist where many cultural aspects from across the globe and across time can exist. East and West, traditional and futuristic, the actual and the invented can blend to various degrees without being questioned. I think this seemingly romantic approach to combining various elements is what attracts me to it. I also think my work tries to accomplish this. Much like in still-life paintings where the array of what is depicted could bear some deep significance or could equally have been added in on the whim of the artist. Everything seems casual, and yet is treated with great importance. I like the mystery, absurdity, drama, and humor of this contradiction. In my work all of these considerations result in a mental and emotional exercise which lets me identify what I find valuable in life.