This body of work is about creating alternative realities rooted in personal and shared spiritualities to transcend the constraining conditions of migration, the nostalgia that follows, and a deep reckoning with belonging. Throughout my art thesis practice, I had ample time to explore different feelings and ideas, materializing them through charcoal drawings, performance, and experimental video installations.

Using my own body as a tool and resource is an important part of my work. It’s something I can always return to and is the only constant place of belonging in my life regardless of laws, social regulations, and any other cultural othering. It is this solace in my body that allows me to see it as a site of agency and power. The tactile quality of charcoal lends itself to exchanges between my body and the material to the point where I feel like it becomes an extension of myself when drawing. The boldness of the lines over brown paper recalls for me a call to presence, an evidence to my existence like pre-historic cave drawings did many years before me. It is through this mark-making that I can dream outside of myself and create semi-deities that function as archetypes to personal and shared feelings. Whether strong or wounded, the figures in my work stand tall, fully enveloped in either suffering, anger, or bliss, and the viewers act as witnesses to the breathing scene. 

The process for making this body of work has been a deeply introspective one. In this process, I have discovered how much my Catholic upbringing has impacted my aesthetic and thematic choices. At the same time, I have been more aware of the gaps in my connection to spirituality through the Catholic church. I recall many times when I felt like the physical attributes of the figures and saints didn’t resemble mine and I yearned for something different. As a kid I remember being fascinated by The Passion of Christ. It had always moved something deep within myself that was beyond my comprehension. Now that I’m older, I recognize that, beyond religious parameters, I was responding to the superhuman ability to endure and transform – the mystery of faith. In Afro-Cuban religions like Santería or in the African-American Baptist church, where the spirit(s) can take over a person’s body, I sometimes view my process as surrendering to this uninhibited energy that elevates me to a trance-like creative state. Especially when tapping into feelings of pain and suffering through charcoal drawings, I push myself to a space of explosive vulnerability that is easily channeled through the bold lines and smudging of the charcoal. 

My video practice expands upon this visceral exploration by using time and movement to communicate states of mind. It also allows me to expand into abstract ideas that take place in a sort of abyss where various currents of feelings are coursing through simultaneously, like in immigrant meditations. Both my video and charcoal work interact with the architecture of the installation space. Especially with the scale of the figure drawings, I’m referencing church scrolls that hang from the ceiling and add a celestial quality to them. In many ways, I’m interested in creating my own spiritual space that exists outside of religion.

These different mediums allow me to depict and transform the suffering and the pain into works of a divine quality that call to mind a surrendering into this bliss that is not defined, but is always moving and charged with energy. I delight in witnessing that dance between beauty and pain. Working in this space helps me produce works that, on the surface, might appear troubled and pained, but under them hide a promising feeling of pleasure and hope.