Statement

Landscape is most interesting to me in its relation to the human narrative that takes place against this backdrop. Borderlands are a particularly electrified space. My very existence is predicated upon my grandparents’ families who crossed the Mexican border during the Mexican revolution. Thus I have been compelled to depict these focal settings. The landscapes of immigration I am currently working on are those of immigration detention centers, present, past and imagined, from Alcatraz to Alligator Alcatraz. I am concurrently in the midst of a series honoring Latino farmworkers in the San Joaquin Valley and North Carolina.

I painted the border paintings of Israel/Gaza and Syria in response to war. I used the landscape background of news photos as reference. The Atlas Mountains paintings represent for me a heavenly utopian vision of religious and cultural harmony, a high altitude ideal.

My Bay Area paintings of the Golden Gate without the bridge, and different views of the bay removing infrastructure imagine a view before "settlement." I seek solace in these landscapes, and look to them for potential healing and a striving for a better way forward, both socially and ecologically.