Introduction

It's always a little strange to look back and wonder how we ended up where we are today. For me, however, it is a simple reminder of how art has been there with me the whole way. I have been making art for most of my life; it is something that I can always come back to, a place in which I can always find new meaning and motivation. With art, the world is quite literally your oyster. There are endless visual and existential possibilities. I love that I can take inspiration from anything and produce my own unique interpretation for others to see and think about. It is the same satisfaction and excitement that I would imagine a scientist deriving from designing and executing their own experiment, never entirely sure what results to expect.

Making art is always an experiment, whether it be with colors forms, texture, composition, new materials or techniques and processes. It is also so on a more conceptual level, dealing with juxtaposing loaded imagery, the subconscious, or even telling a story. There are far too many different approaches to choose from. I like to work in a variety of media, including acrylic and oil paint, gouache, watercolor, pen and ink, and collage, but I especially love printmaking. The flat, graphic quality of prints first grabbed my attention through the massive lithographic posters of the turn of the century. The flat but vibrant planes of color and high contrast line work of Lautrec, Cappiello, and Cheret led me to pursue printmaking, which I soon discovered to be a medium with a lot of room for creativity. Although I also enjoy exploring many different themes in my work, the notion of identity, and its deconstruction, has been my main focus recently.

What defines identity? There is more to it than "identity is who you are". As people we all individually identify with communities greater than ourselves, with society, collective entities that often dictate certain protocols, perception, and cultural codes. So, to an extent, we are what they

say we are, or what we are supposed to be. As a person of mixed racial and ethnic background, I am quite familiar with existing in and identifying with two different groups at once. Although I identify with two unique cultures, I am often pressured to choose between the two, which makes me sometimes feel that I am not a part of either camp, but in my own grey area between the two. What interests me about all this is picking up on the tools and methods that people use to identify themselves, and then visually re/deconstructing them. Some examples might be clothing and fashion, social cliques, race, language, and nowadays, technology.

I have played on these particular ideas primarily by mixing and matching imagery that does not feel like as though it is supposed to be mixed. One example would be an image of a black man with white hands. I have also gone more in the direction of social commentary with a series of "Gangster Portraits" portraying minorities dressed in stereotypical thug attire but brandishing Nerf dart guns. Text is another subversive tool, one that is particularly important in that it implies a message and a language, it implies communication, though it doesn't necessarily actually say anything. As a culture study I hope to create a series of poster advertisements in which the names of the products are spelled as they are really pronounced in Texas and the southwest of the United States. Shoes would become "chuz", and chicken would become "cheekin".

Font itself, such as wingdings, as well as computer languages such as binary code and html also fascinate me. The technological feel of these texts led me to search for more technological/electronic imagery to combine with human means of identification such as clothing, organic imagery, and even human anatomy. My most recent show, "Electric Cactus," a collection of ink and wash drawing and prints dealt primarily with this type of imagery, fusing plants and circuitry as well as lights and microphones.

My work is intended to twist and mesh reality that throws the viewer off initially, but hopefully has them leaving with their unique interpretation and a thought or two they might not have had otherwise. I aim to continue experimenting with the subtle juxtaposition, or rather marrying, of contradictory imagery in my work, though not all my content is based around this approach, nor related to identity or technology. I often feel a need to return to painting and drawing, whether it be traditional still life or an abstract expressionist 'search for self'. I also enjoy doing work as a designer and poster artist.