As a queer Latino, my camera often serves as a lens through which I extend my personal experiences by means of artistic narrative. My exploration of queerness often intersects with my experience of being a second-generation immigrant. At the core of my recent sculptural work, you will find a singular object, a light bulb. Its function is to illuminate its way through archival images of my childhood from memories of visiting my family in Venezuela. I create box structures from lightbox paper to mimic the idea of a keepsake, a way to store these nonlinear histories and find comfort in my non-traditional upbringing. I question the duality between the domestic & foreign home and my connection to both homes.
Duality is also a recurring motif in my self-portraiture where I’m interested in exploring the mimicry of my body with a touch of sexuality. Through purposeful digital manipulation, I construe the relationship I hold with my body and in return complicate the viewer’s relation to the images. The obscuring of my body and retelling of memory reverberates throughout my work as a means of interrogation. My lamp sculptures are the most recent continuation of my practice. As I re-approach the idea of the “lamp” and its conventions. In its luminosity, inversion, and duplication I approach my photography not only as a means of expression of identity but also as a way to further examine why I create. There is a tension in my identity that I aim to pull at in the space between ideation and conception.