“There are two things that interest me: the relation of people to each other, and the relation of people to land.” ~ Aldo Leopold

My work fundamentally explores relationships; the relationship of people to one another and relationship of people to the land. I consider my interest in human and human-environment relationships as interwoven, stemming from my own experiences growing up in a small town in Wisconsin. My rural life contrasted the Chicano narratives I saw in the media; those characterizations of Latinos had a significant impact on who I thought I should be and what I lacked. It took me decades to reject those myopic narratives and come to terms with who I am, who I want to be, and what things matter to me. As an artist, I now examine this dynamic; how aesthetic, semiotic, and sociopolitical framings encode particular assumptions and ideologies about ourselves, our engagement with our communities, and our relationship to the environments we live with.

Unpacking these aesthetic, semiotic, and sociopolitical frameworks requires dialogue, something that has become increasingly difficult in our current cultural climate. Hence, my interest is in making work that serves as a mechanism for entering into dialogue with one another and the land. Susan Sontag noted that, “photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at.” By making and sequencing images, and incorporating video and audio I work to not only “alter and enlarge,” what is worth "looking at" and discussing, but also to simultaneously construct new narratives that challenge how we understand our relationship to everyday landscapes and the people who occupy them.