My work utilizes my biography not only to explore personal experience, but also to provide
a lens for the persistent effects of social institutions and cultural practices on the individual.I belong to a population absent from U.S. cultural and historical production and often referred to as “illegal.” Within this context, printmaking becomes a response to the exclusionary history, media and texts populating my upbringing. The print and its ability to be reproduced subversively re-assumes the tools of the system to insert condemned and excluded peoples, which I identify into larger conversations to provide the missing pages. My art practice is informed by reverse anthropology, explores themes from my own personal biography, and is explicitly political. Immigration, AIDS, and queer identity are at the forefront of my work. Through my practice, I aim not only able to reclaim my personal narrative, but to creatively reconstruct history. I do this through the reassembly of imagery: colonial propaganda, indigenous codexes, consumer print media. Additionally, I create new iconography presenting alternative and relevant understandings of colonialism, culture, and sex . Using woodcut and intaglio, the oldest forms of printmaking, I recreated religious imagery, mimicking the same process of documentation through printmaking originally used by the Catholic Church to disseminate their religious ideas. Using these same tools, my work proposed a critique of religious institutions and social control. I highlighted the condemned and the excluded by drawing together homosexuality and Pre-Columbian artifacts in a hybrid form. These objects and images are clearly personal, but they also speak to broader issues that are still relevant today.