Artist Statement
I am an interdisciplinary conceptual artist working with both ceramic sculpture and painting. Every clay sculpture is hand built, focusing on detailed surfaces to bring each figure to life. Intermixing the terracotta with saturated acrylic colors enables the work to be caught between two worlds–both the ancient and an ultra processed present day. My paintings are highly rendered, blending and shifting contemporary colonial realities with feelings of entrapment and delight.
The imagery and themes across both mediums stem from distant memories, personal photographs, glimpses of Guatemala, as well as hoarded objects one might find at thrift stores. The colonial idea of superiority over other people, animals, and land has created a cyclical dance of a never-ending thirst for more. Erasure of indigenous identity and practices for self preservation, and the “culture” of mass consumption and waste many of us have now as replacement for lost traditions are all themes I explore in my work. I repeatedly ask questions about place, ancestral pasts and futures, as well as our own role in a hyper consumer-based society.
I question what creates an “individual” in our westernized world. Much of it has to do with the objects we purchase as an attempt to define ourselves, to be able to camouflage into white spaces. As a Guatemalan-American who has been detached from my own ancestral land, I spend a lot of time as an artist attempting to reconnect with a culture I used to reject as a form of assimilation. Looking back to the moments in my young life where I so desperately wished to wake up blue eyed and blonde, or refused to speak to my mother in her native tongue as to not be “othered.” The goal of my work is to understand and respect the land and resources we inhabit and use each day, and to reject and confront ideas of white supremacy.
The imagery and themes across both mediums stem from distant memories, personal photographs, glimpses of Guatemala, as well as hoarded objects one might find at thrift stores. The colonial idea of superiority over other people, animals, and land has created a cyclical dance of a never-ending thirst for more. Erasure of indigenous identity and practices for self preservation, and the “culture” of mass consumption and waste many of us have now as replacement for lost traditions are all themes I explore in my work. I repeatedly ask questions about place, ancestral pasts and futures, as well as our own role in a hyper consumer-based society.
I question what creates an “individual” in our westernized world. Much of it has to do with the objects we purchase as an attempt to define ourselves, to be able to camouflage into white spaces. As a Guatemalan-American who has been detached from my own ancestral land, I spend a lot of time as an artist attempting to reconnect with a culture I used to reject as a form of assimilation. Looking back to the moments in my young life where I so desperately wished to wake up blue eyed and blonde, or refused to speak to my mother in her native tongue as to not be “othered.” The goal of my work is to understand and respect the land and resources we inhabit and use each day, and to reject and confront ideas of white supremacy.