This body of work is made of hundreds of millions of tiny tally marks in ballpoint pen layered over and over again on the surface of a canvas or paper until none of the white support shows through. In order to achieve perfect coverage, I used an innovative technique of attaching many ballpoint pens to an electric drill. This intensive process is what I do daily as an act of self-discipline. Self-discipline helps us understand ourselves and the world we live in. My work addresses the day-to-day issues in the most basic and fundamental way. It begins with one tally mark.

My paintings consist of carefully prepared grounds of handmade graphite paint on which I draw hundreds of individual silverpoint lines. My recent work is concerned with the idea of disruption: a pattern starts out under flexible conditions, and with a combination of intentional interruption and entropy the pattern breaks down. In the end, this subtle chaos creates something that resembles patterns in the natural world, revealing subjectivity through an apparently rigid system. The role light plays in the work similarly references those most conspicuous daily markers of natural

Once you learn how to read, you can’t turn it off. You can’t control ambient reading: street signs, graffiti, posters, advertisements. We live in a world of words. For some, the object environment is like that as well, filled with things one cannot not see: the whorl of a tendril on a rose bush, the wavy edge of a mushroom, the desiccated, dried, question-mark-shaped worm glued to the sidewalk. Those things I cannot not see in the environment, reduced to organic, abstract forms and shapes, inspire my painting and sculpture.

In my current studio work, I study and explore the grid, patterning, and repetition. Coming from a design background, I pursue these experimental investigations in the form of drawings, sketches, and weavings. Half of my practice has been devoted to quilt, rug, and floor drawings. These pieces are meant to comment on the representation of the actual objects they mimic, as well as provide a new context through variations in space and medium. In the other half of my practice I use a preexisting grid structure— snow fencing—as a foundation for basic weaving methods.

My work reinterprets the accoutrements surrounding highschool football in New Orleans. The pomp and circumstance encircling the field opens a larger discussion about affiliation, and our collective reckoning with arbitrary markers of identity, be it race or nationality, or whether we were born into a family of Saints fans or followers of Jesus. I create simulations of the objects of commemoration and celebration on the field: DIY T-shirts celebrating one’s son on the team, or the handsewn marching-band banners or dance-team uniforms. I embellish

Heavily influenced by a dense and rich art form of storytelling in West Africa, my creative practice borrows from a pool of uniquely coded text and visually based languages from Ghana. In an exploration of relationships between my past experiences in Africa and my present residence in the United States, I am drawn to themes that define the then and the now, differences and similarities, and the image and the self. My practice analyzes the relationships between the semiotics and historicity of these themes, as a grappling coalescence of a postcolonial upbringing

Taking to the water is a deeply substantial part of our collective histories and modern existence.

Nothing that has once come into existence will have passed away and all the earlier phases of development continue to exist alongside the latest one.
–Sigmund Freud

The “me” you see today is an overlapping of the “me” who grew up in São Paulo, the “me” who now calls Florida home, the “me” who left for Xi’An after graduation, and the “me” who came back to the United States because life in China became too comfortable.

My works are attempts to make sense of the world that I (we) live in, by exploring the dissonance between false binaries and dualities that is prevalent in ideologies both throughout history and in the immediate present. Questions that I find myself drawn to include perversion and innocence, the wielding of power, the dynamics of gender and of good and evil. Much of the imagery I use in my work is a nod toward animé/manga, video games, art history, and mythology, distorted into reimagined narratives.

If life is a vast broth of entangled actions, making art is how I chart my way through the soup. Having been removed from my homeland of Mexico at a young age, I became accustomed to localizing my identity at the crossroads of memory, fact, and fiction. My work draws from personal histories of migration and adaptation. I consider my work meditative in that it strives to dissect and understand the components of my experience and my cultural and aesthetic legacy in a way that might give a greater understanding of the whole. While I use symbols, architectures,