Statement

My work deals with societal conflict and violence as products of unchecked male virility and American cultural hegemony. I use the tension between violence and humor in my work to depict dynamic amalgams of cultural identity giving a historical context for the mass violence in contemporary American society and along its southern border. In service of this, I mine historical and cultural references that include the visual canon of medieval Christian imagery, 18th Century Colonial Spanish Casta paintings, cartoons, and comic books to depict fictional battles on the Mexican-American border and to satirize Anglo-Saxon cultural hegemony. My work also deals with my identity as an artist and the process of making art. I use drawn and etched conversations between myself and death in order to portray a testament of life as a Mexican-American artist living and working in New York City.