As a multi-disciplinary artist with a socially engaged art practice, I create drawings, sculptures, and paintings that confront the palpable inescapability of race and transform art into an act of cultural and spiritual reclamation. I grew up undocumented and disconnected, and my practice is in part a response to this. I conjure indigenous spiritualities to embody the aesthetics of personal histories, cultural resistance, and colonial disruption. I am the grandson of a Curandera and myself a practitioner of Curanderismo, and when I make art I am making a mystical instrument that forges a pre-conquest connection in order to interrupt eurocentric models and heal wounds of colonization. My art combats historical and cultural erasure and uses creativity as a decolonizing ritual.
I spent ten years as a construction worker, pushing my body to its limits as I poured concrete and installed drywall. Now, I use the skills of the construction worker to create objects in homage to the undocumented laboring class, a lineage my family is part of. My materials are silicone, lumber, drywall, concrete, and hardware. These atypical fine arts materials, when mixed with beads, sea shells, rope, and maize, create artworks that celebrate the craft of brown labor while immortalizing my stories and the stories of my communities.
Like DNA strings of mestizaje, my practice confronts contradiction — indian/conqueror, violence/unity, ancient/contemporary, and artist/artisan. Rummaging through my lived experiences, I cobble together new forms, revive forgotten ancestors, and tap into my mythical heritage. My hybrid cultural origins and multiple identities become strength, become the power to see back and ahead and through, and my hands labor to keep up, mining old traditions for new tools to help my spirit and ancestors speak to and through me. My art screams what is written in my bones.