Art Statement

My work examines how power structures shape terrains of knowledge and memory. I work across installation, sculpture, and photography to present language from the page and place it into unconventional forms of reading. Common materials found in domestic spaces are repurposed to investigate migration, intergenerational struggle, and the commodification of knowledge. Books are treated as physical objects that are cut, wrapped, obscured, or reduced to fragments, foregrounding their material and ideological conditions. I recontextualize materials such as books, note pads, and tools to confront how education, memory, and truth are shaped by economic and political forces. My installations often juxtapose playful or familiar forms with difficult historical narratives, creating a tension between comfort and discomfort, between personal memory and collective history. The work requires a form of slowed or obstructed reading, where meaning is encountered through fragments, gaps, and material resistance. These conditions shape not only how knowledge is accessed, but whose histories are made visible and whose are systematically obscured.

The written word is a form of material that carries authority, omission, and ideology. Within this practice, questions of censorship, redaction, and the fragility of access to knowledge are embedded through material gestures. To wrap a book in blank canvas is to render its contents silent, pointing to what is hidden, erased, or withheld. Each fold becomes a gesture of care and restraint, suggesting both preservation and control. In this sense, my use of text is not about readability, but about visibility, what knowledge looks like when it is protected, restricted, or made inaccessible. 

Oral histories are equally important to my work. Many of my installations draw from the stories of my grandmother’s immigration from Mexico and from family narratives passed down through memory rather than documentation. These stories are fragmented, emotional, existing outside institutional archives. This relationship to language extends into my dermatographism (“skin-writing”) art, where text is no longer confined to paper or object but written directly onto skin. This creates an unstable, reactive surface to articulate my experience as a second-generation Mexican in California. Language in this context is temporary, shifting through the physiological response of the skin as it reacts to pressure and contact. The skin becomes a site where language is temporarily held, blurred, and transformed through the body’s own response. By embedding these situational reflections, I attempt to give form to what is usually invisible or unheard, treating memory itself as a material. 

I also create installations using work tools and books to address generational labor and educational expectations. Suspended arrangements reference the pressure that comes with educational achievement in immigrant families, the feeling of standing between two worlds while carrying both inherited labor and inherited expectations. Books in these installations symbolize both the promise of education and the dangers of its gatekeeping. To gain knowledge is to uncover not only opportunity, but also the silences embedded within institutional narratives.

Ultimately, the work constructs spaces where inherited narratives and institutional structures can be questioned through material and language-based processes. Across installation, sculpture, and photography, text is understood as unstable, moving between body, object, and environment. Viewers are positioned within these spaces as active readers, navigating absence, obstruction, and partial visibility.