Statement

I craft sculptural series in varying scales that consider the formal and conceptual spaciousness of containers, like baskets and nets, as a category of object and field of experimentation. As a first-generation queer Latine artist my practice is a form of gathering across time, space, and difference within a polarized contemporary context that continues to reproduce colonial systems of separation and exclusion. My handmade queer containers expand traditional forms through improvisational making, and extend function beyond utility through the use of experimental materials like mylar emergency blankets and plastic lacing: materials embedded in complex and asymmetrical relationships between nature and culture.

My work shimmers as it reflects and refracts light, ideas, and resonances. The Mayan concept of lem, or shine, is associated with mirrors, gems, and lightning, phenomena that connect the terrestrial and the celestial. Shimmer, Roland Barthes suggests, is a perceptual quality that undermines binary thinking through its mutability and ongoing play of differentiation. Similarly, the Yolngu concept of bir’yun, or shimmer, is experienced when one witnesses the complex connectivity and animacy of all things at all times. In my work, experiencing shimmer in its fullness invites the letting go of linear thought and progressive time - hallmarks of colonial-capitalist consciousness.

My intuitively made sculptures shimmer…between personal and shared experience, time/space travel, contemplative speculation, and queer erotics. The basketry and netting techniques I use produce shape-shifting wall, floor, and free-standing sculptures that dazzle referentially between vessels, masks, portals, mirrors, webs, and relics - threshold objects that transport the imagination and transform perception. They also transmute industrial materials connected to accelerated consumption and ecological crisis into twinkling containers that encourage us to hold and carry differently. They invite the viewer to re-encounter and reconsider the humble container’s generous form, inclusive logic, and unlimited potential as a carrier of meanings, identities, shared histories, and communal futures.