I feed off my heroes and the invention of reality.

I value art that seeks to inspire and provoke. It is with these intentions that I paint, collaborate, and create. The series titled Initiate Your Gaze functions as an installation by mirroring the visual details found in the surrounding exhibition space. Engaging with architectural elements of the room and with art by other artists, the paintings encourage the act of looking.

Much of my creative scholarship is informed by the dual current cultural climates in Chicago and Puerto Rico. The content of my works, whether they are recontextualized existing products or original constructions, reflects a similar duality. Through an aesthetic of minimalism, social practice, vernacular imagery, and consumer goods, I mine the roots of cultural and sociopolitical structures. By focusing on a reduced palette, a single form, a pose, or an object, my formal choices emphasize both overt and clandestine meaning.

At age thirteen, I began to look at things differently. The small town I grew up in was suddenly provincial, the authority figures I had always looked up to were absurd, and God was made up, like Santa Claus. I became angry at the world and acted out by carving obscenities into trees and lighting things on fire. Fortunately, I also developed a sense of humor. This turned out to be a more effective and long-term way of dealing with my anxiety.

These are three paintings from a cycle representing scenes from the life of Felix Antonio Santamaría. Felix is eleven and a half years old and lives with his mother, Leticia, and his grandmother, Lucrecia. His father left his mother for a man when Felix was five. His grandmother is a poet and a zealous Catholic with a small cocaine habit whose mission is the salvation of Felix’s soul, and his mother is a tenured professor in the Gender Studies department of a prestigious university in Chicago.

My paintings focus on sites of consumption and production in the contemporary environment, and explore capitalist consumerism. The subjects I choose are deeply rooted in my experience growing up amidst frenzied transformations in China, with its subsequent unbearable urban density.

My work tackles many themes head-on: hip-hop, art history, popular culture, sexuality, the racial divide, and self are recurring subjects. I take many of my cues from standup comedians, whose routines I listen to while in my studio. Humor and color are two tools that I employ to bring the viewer in for closer examination. My utilization of craft materials offers familiarity, but it also creates the problematic of figuring out how each material should work within each piece. This is important due to my distrust of painting and wanting to problem-solve when I create

Queer Mountain is an uninhabited high-desert wilderness near Death Valley, and it is difficult to see. I tried, unsuccessfully, a few summers ago, after finding it on a map while planning a road trip somewhere else. I made it to the outskirts, but an intense fire season followed by a wet winter had washed out the roads in, and I was forced to head back the same way I came without seeing any of it. It wasn’t until much later that I started to think of this failed trip—my inability to reach this place—as an analog for a kind of fantasy tethered to landscape.

My sense of place, as an artist and as a human being, is in a continual state of in between. The two poles of this state are the physical and digital worlds. It is a constant mediation between the actual and the ephemeral: a moment-to-moment negotiation of being, thinking, and communicating. My work as an artist addresses this mediation. New, interesting questions arise when the two poles are brought together in the form of traditional painting (physical world) and digital media (virtual world). I am grounded in this discourse.

The structures I paint on are made primarily out of discarded wood. The building where my studio is located also houses carpenters who generously give me their scraps. I pick through this residue to pull out the interesting shapes and forms. There is a lot of collecting in my process. I visit thrift stores looking for wooden animals, bowls, and bric-a-brac to cut and fit into my structures. Collecting and reformation are vital parts of my work, and allow me to create wonderful problems for myself.