Specters are the underpainting in both my canvas, and rubbers. Paper and inkjet transfers are manipulated photos of family, archival material, my fifteen-year-old self, and images that reference US military occupations. Stretching over dimensional structures, like skeletons that refuse to be rolled away, I want to show barrages of damage as the only *infrastructure* that empires leave behind. I rub the surfaces of paintings with fingertips, removing fiber in a gesture that veils and excavates. Likewise, when I brush rubber, I am indexing an embodiment that is exalted in color, space and scale. Can touch be a relief against forced forgetting––a disobedient affective mark that strokes over joints and awnings in canvas and rubbers, and extends itself to the claw clips and metal threatening to burst through the surface? I yearn for an abstraction that is sentimental, and unapologetic.
When I started to paint, I was mystified by abstraction, so I thought painting abstractly I’d learn what it is. Now, I realize that my schooling had a predilection for an abstraction that positioned itself against being didactic, and equated figuration to didacticism. It required unlearning to perceive the subtlety in imagemaking that is a continuous dialectic between figuration and abstraction. It took me years to gather the courage to speak about what deeply inspires me. Like a confession, I dealt with the guilt of being a secondary witness. The work I’ve done in the past year feels like a coming of age that involves belying the myths of a heroic mother, romanticized social movements and perceiving a historically contingent girlhood. I realized I experience self-censorship, an internalized state terror. Experimental painting has meant to experiment inwardly, questioning impulses, aversions, and desires. Painting materializes that conflicts I perceive externally reflect conflicts inside me.
I draw myself because my critique is limited by my positionality and not just the wall or the stretcher bar. I am both irritated and motivated by the categorical stigma that sculptural painting ignites. Beyond the natural questions of volume, flatness, and space, I am invested in how painterly illusion and materiality give way to affective mark-making. My work in rubbers and plastics shows a process that exalts embodiment. In my installations and at large scale I look or I search for bodies that relate to one another, and evoke systems of interdependence. I make stretchers without math, aligning wood to drawings directly and letting the intersections show me the angles. I value color for its potential as a sign or symbol along with its emotive effect. The transfers in my wall work use material from both my personal archive, the Guatemalan police archive, and my family’s ephemera. The collage starts in Photoshop where I colorize, edit, and digitally draw, paint, and alter archival material and ephemera. This process of removal, covering and editing is reflective of the fragmentation, distortion, and the inexpressible within forms of memory.