artist statement

At my core, I am a visual artist, but language is both my medium and my subject. I use it physically. Books, texts, and words merge with pigment, collage, and found objects to form storied surfaces that function as sculptural systems. I work by dismantling books to isolate individual pages, extracting charged passages, and entombing them within dense layers of paint, plaster, and minerals. Through this process, language becomes tactile and weighted; a material register of the gravity words carry. This ritual of literary dissection and tangible reinvention allows me to examine how personal, cultural, academic, and historical frameworks are constructed, reimagined, and absorbed over time.

Reading has long served a dual role in my practice: as a space of refuge and of rupture. It is where imagination expands, but also where authority quietly consolidates itself, where histories are aestheticized, distorted, or erased through reiteration and belief. By breaking books apart and embedding fragments of text into materially resistant surfaces, I interrupt their assumed neutrality and their (often) presumed authority. Words are slowed down, fractured, and pressed into physical strata that resist immediacy, demanding prolonged attention and critical analysis.

The work materializes through sustained inquiry rather than the linear execution of a singular project. Vestiges of intergenerational memory, art historical reference, and archival remnants resurface and gradually accumulate. Meaning is built through repetition, restraint, and accretive tension, allowing narratives to shift rather than resolve. This duality, between preservation and disruption, parallels the role reading itself plays in the creative process and reveals how memory and power operate through what is recorded, revised, and, also, what is withheld.

Miami is a city shaped by migration and convergence, where distinct cultural identities remain proudly intact while blending into a vibrant, expressive, and ever-evolving social fabric unique to this place we call home. Living and working here has refined my sensitivity to language as a fulcrum of negotiation and erasure, particularly within multilingual, bureaucratic, and civic contexts. Miami’s layered social and diasporic complexity informs how my work evaluates the local imprint of global systems of power across environment, history, and identity. Through studio-based and public-facing projects in Miami-Dade, my practice extends into shared civic spaces, where language and memory are encountered collectively. The work invites viewers to slow down, question inherited ideologies, and engage physically and intellectually with what knowledge is preserved, what is commodified, and what is quietly lost.