My work begins with the instability of the self—its capacity to be both subject and material. I use photography, installation, and sculptural strategies to examine how identity forms through fragmentation, how an image can be constructed, obscured, or reassembled through personal archive, cultural pressure, and the act of seeing. Materiality is central to this inquiry. I treat the photographic image not as a transparent container of truth but as something malleable, capable of being shaped, manipulated, or pushed toward uncertainty. This is especially significant to me as a queer Latino and second-generation Venezuelan American, for whom duplicity, legibility, and misrecognition are lived conditions. By leveraging light, inversion, transparency, and obstruction, I create images that resist resolution and reveal how identity is continually negotiated rather than fixed.
This line of inquiry emerged during my undergraduate studies in Photo/Media at the University of Washington, where I became interested in photography not simply as representation but as an object with physical, emotional, and conceptual weight. My focus on materiality, obscurity, and duplicity has evolved into an exploration of how images behave when pushed to their limits, when they fail, fragment, or shift into something else. I am fascinated by the photograph as a site where perception and reality collide, where the boundary between self and image becomes unstable.
Based in New York, NY
pic credit: Aaron Banh