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.

My work explores the states between inside and outside by focusing on the thingness of a painting. While hinting at pictorial space, I look for ways to erode the hierarchy of supports, surface, and picture plane by using all components to create an image.

Perhaps ironically, the motivation to make text work comes from my skepticism about language, naming, and legibility. I wonder what it might feel like to experience the world without language. Using a specialty sign-painting enamel, I draw the text or gridded background until the surface of the canvas is covered. Some paintings are then sanded or carved, giving the surface a quality not normally associated with painterliness. The purpose of these techniques is to embed the text within the ground of the painting— to emphasize the visual over the legible.

For several years my paintings have suggested shallow, stage-like spaces, activated by patterned forms performing in front of curtains or simple backdrops. Recently, they have also included depictions of pennant strings, confetti streamers, and pompoms—the stuff of staged celebrations. I consider staginess to be a fundamental condition of painting, and I hope for results that both picture and embody it.

Through abstraction, my work explores binaries and symbols. They mimic the way I witness identity functioning within contemporary society: hybridized. I want to resist an absolute and have the work communicate this, as if to say, “I’m not what you think I am.” I am interested in finding new ways to communicate a lived experience through object conversion. I include variations in dimensionality, both illusionistic and formal, to have the works remain in flux. As a first-generation Cuban-American, I have had to adjust where I situate myself

African Americans today are faced with centuries-old myths and misguided perceptions perpetuated by the dominant culture that have reached a fever pitch across the country. At times, the African-American male is a prisoner within himself and his neighborhood because of his race or circumstance. One could argue that he was dead before birth.

The idea of a peach that we envision when we hear or read the word embodies the fundamental characteristics of the thing rather than the specific characteristics of the piece of fruit you last encountered. The perfect archetype comes to mind. Relying on a sense of familiarity, these works are painted from a mental idea of what a peach looks like, or what a leaf looks like. But that archetype is faulty. A slight betrayal of expectations is at play. Specific characteristics and peculiarities appear within the rendering of each leaf, and the peaches are all depicted as white

I am interested in making abstract paintings that traffic in representation. I want to use recognizable imagery as a means to provide access for a viewer while the image as a whole engages more formal and abstract dialogues. The work is a process of translating art history, pop ephemera, and lived experience.

This series of artworks uses appropriated and self-created images that address the mythic, and sometimes truthful, African-American cultural persona. By rendering the surface decay of images, textured materials, and language, the visual disintegration within the works informs the breakdown of the cultural psyche that has persisted over centuries of oppression, miseducation, and division of the Black race throughout history.

My practice is centered on carrying out the Mormon mission I was never allowed to undertake due to a failed church-led “sexualreorientation” therapy in my youth. Engaging with intimacy, radical empathy, cosmic retribution, and the elevation of psychic baseness, I am, as Vaginal Davis describes me, a “dainty Satanist.”