Artist Statement
My work considers questions of cultural migrations, margins, and notions of interiority that have been engineered through history, and how we experience this cultural slippage between the present and the past. I cull references from everyday objects and surfaces, historical materials, Sci-Fi and pop culture, and symbolic forms of mythic nature that clash with synthetic nature. My process uses some variation of paint media, cut paper, and layered drawing techniques, and distilling images through mapping software. I combine these practices to create spatial constructions in which romanticized notions of the past, must exist next to the consequences that were produced as the present. I am interested in how hybridity is both a literal and metaphoric gesture to create complex narratives and spaces. My research focuses on mining surface design materials, looking at the lineages of tourism culture, and reading historical texts in relation to current socio-political events.
In my current project, I sample/remix the work of Agostino Brunias, an 18th century European painter who depicted various scenes of daily life and social class in the Caribbean. I reconstruct parts of these works to explore representations of gender and racial hierarchies in colonial imagery. My practice and research correlates Brunias’ use of textiles as a mediator between women and social power, with other design motifs that export cultural identities as luxury objects, such as panoramic wallpapers and other architectures of assimilation. In these work’s the neon grid acts as both a signifier of modern spatial organization, and a liminal space that interrupts the characters to the field of their environment, to speculate an alternative history. I am interested in the transformation of turning artworks of economic speculation into speculative histories, in which narratives about women’s lives and relationships can be reconfigured and play with anarchical forms. In her essay Sea Dreams: Isaac Julien’s Western Union: Small Boats, Jennifer Gonzalez, asks “how do artworks act out or reenact a changing perceptual relationship between the aesthetic past and the present through a kind of time travel”. Through these works I want to study and depict time as kind of apparatus or technology that embodies cultural imprints, in which representations of past and the present are occurring in the same space and attempting to alter one another. For me, this approach to making art is a way of confronting contemporary issues of economic empire, and how we move in, around, with, and away from it.
