Photo taken by my fellow artist, colleague and friend Ashley Rose Tacheira
Bio
As a visual engineer, my interdisciplinary art training allows me to find balance with my own mental health practice, while exploring the feelings of belonging, empathizing and healing intergenerational traumas. My research continues to explore unfamiliar connections between myself and my privileges. I am a neuro diverse, light skinned, cis-male, able bodied, english speaking, Two Spirited, Queer, Chicano, with a college degree, and a U.S. citizen of over 3 generations of hardworking, hard loving, and resilient Mexican / Indigenous American lineage. I am both the indigenous and the colonizer, the oppressor and the oppressed, the producer and the consumer trying to understand my dualities as a Millennial in the 21st century. I articulate these subjects respectfully through printmaking, painting, and sculpture, to outline the contested use of space and consciousness of how much space I’m taking up.
I am originally from the working-class community of San José California, aka the Silicon Valley aka the rightful ancestral land of the Ohlone People in San Francisco's Bay Area, where I grew up until I graduated from Community College. I come from over 3 generations of Mexican-Americans, Chicanas and Chicanos. My upbringing in this diverse community informs my work as a South Bay Area Chicano artist, researcher, and advocate in substantive ways. I am currently based in San José, CA, until I relocate to Los Angeles in 2021.