Puerto Rico / Honduras
BIO:
As a New Orleans native, I grew up in a household rich in culture. While my mother’s family has lived in South Louisiana for generations, my father grew up in New Jersey, the son of Puerto Rican and Honduran immigrants. As a child, exposure to graffiti and street art instilled in me the idea that art is for everyone and that opportunities to create it are everywhere. Further strengthening these ideals are the eccentricities of a city hundreds of years old, filled with a vibrant passion for color and individual expression. My immersion in such rich history has drastically influenced and shaped my understanding of beauty and aesthetic.
Over time, I’ve developed a style of highly functional sculpture, built with a combination of thrown and handbuilt elements. Using decorative techniques including slip trailing, image transfers, and lusters, I create work that is colorful and character driven.
Using the simplicity and universality of the human skull as a base, I build a fixed representation of an individual that is unexpectedly functional—as a vessel or a box. I harness the inherent respect we bestow upon the dead to express ideas that do not rely on cultural preconceptions, yet celebrate decoration, utility, and individuality. Without beauty or skin color or the overabundance of flesh to distract you, can you see the person there?
Most recently I’ve begun to develop a new body of work that communicates my interpretation of parenthood and the morphing of one individual to include another. Starting with a rich terracotta clay I handbuild a vessel, pushing out the clay walls in a varying pattern, expanding the subject but not quite breaking through the surface, much in the way mothers often internalize the pushings of society and are subconsciously shaped by them. I then apply spaced monoprint strips cut from a painting of underglazes made in collaboration with my young daughter. The porcelain slip used to create the monoprint is in high contrast to the dark clay beneath. Uneven, broken, and patched, the vessel may or may not hold water. Covering and distracting from the imperfections and uncertainty is a free-spirited expression of color and life, filling the cracks wrapping themselves around and around until both vessel and print are better for the existence of the other.