Work
Work Chronology
Every series and every public commission, most recent first. The series were not programs begun on a date. They are recognitions cast backward, named after noticing that work already made was asking the same question.
Teōtl Pāntlitl: Divine Standards
11 works
Our ancestors took their forms from the living world, because there was nowhere else to take them from. A crest, a glyph, a shield: each one is a shape something alive arrived at first. So honoring where you come from and honoring what you come from were never two loyalties. The standard and the creature on it are one process arriving twice. Teōtl is the Nahua name for that process: a single sacred energy that conti...
+5 moreBefore Words
5 works, 4 published
Each work in Before Words begins as a folded sheet of paper, cut by hand and unfolded to reveal a bilaterally symmetrical form, then layered over a richly painted ground in mixed media on paper. The grounds are not decorative choices. Raw sienna, burnt sienna, yellow ochre, and terre verte are among the oldest pigments in human art-making, found in cave paintings, Byzantine icons, and Renaissance frescos. The forms t...
Modules
2 works
Hexagonal wood panels, stained with iron acetate until the surface turns the colour of iron oxide, then cut, channelled and filled with resin. A module is a unit that only makes sense beside another one. These are built to tile, and so far there are two. Three blue resin channels meet at the centre of a face and divide it, the way a cell wall divides tissue and a tile divides a floor. The division is real, it is lo...
Masks
6 works
A mask is normally a surface you hide behind. These are lattices, cut through until there is more absence than material, so you end up looking at the wearer through the thing meant to conceal them. Laser-cut plywood, epoxy resin, gold mylar, jute string. An ovoid shell of irregular polygonal cells. A polyhedron flattened into projection and hung from a cord. The cell wall structure of a diatom and the strut geometr...
Totems
11 works, 10 published
Ten square works, ten by ten inches, cut paper and ink and acrylic over flat painted fields. Each one is vertical and frontal and reads as a totem, or as a device on a shield. They are named for a quality and an organism at the same time. Root Totem (Square Tomato). Dialectic Totem (Brain Coral). Influence Totem (Tendrils). Passion Totem on a cobalt field. That pairing is the whole body. A heraldic device and a bra...
+4 moreCnidarian
10 works, 9 published
Cnidarians have no brain. No central nervous system, no front, no place where the animal is more itself than anywhere else. They sense and respond across the whole body at once, and they have been doing it for something like six hundred million years. Each work here is a radially symmetric cut-paper form, roughly twenty inches square with two inches of real relief, built in paper, ink and acrylic over a painted grou...
+3 moreSpecimens
6 works
Small works, roughly eight by five inches, cut paper and acrylic mounted on bare kraft board and recycled cardboard so the substrate reads as a specimen card. Each title names something living, then a pair of properties that will not resolve. Coral Sponge Specimen (Healing & Toxic). Mexican Sycamore Specimen (Roots & Ax). Heavens Ceiba Specimen (Smoke & Wood). Quetzal Skull Specimen (Bone & Skin). Blue Maiz Specimen...
Two Live By A Star
Public Art · Austin Fire Station 25 and Travis County EMS Station 10, Austin, Texas
An indoor hanging lighted sculpture, 7.5 feet in diameter and 13 feet 4 inches overall with its mounting pole, in the entrance atrium. Hand-drawn and designed digitally, then engineered and fabricated in metal. A house is essentially a box. It is a container for people to live in. The cube is a structure, a good representation of something routine, not complicated, ordinary but strong, dependable, and structured. A ...
Veni, Vidi, Vita Maris
0 works, none published yet
Veni, vidi, vita Maris, I came, I saw, sea life, is a series that reimagines the ocean's inhabitants as peaceful sentinels of resilience and contemplation. Playing off the classical Latin phrase, this title shifts the focus from conquest to a deeper understanding and respect for the delicate dance of life beneath the sea. Each piece captures a moment of serenity and grace, emphasizing the quiet, humble lives of marin...
Interphase: Nepantla
5 works
Interphase is the stretch of the cell cycle between one division and the next, when the cell is not dividing and is not resting either. It is doing the work that makes the next division possible. Nepantla is Nahuatl for the middle place. Gloria Anzaldua took it up for the condition of being between worlds and belonging to neither. Five works from 2024 in cut paper, ink, acrylic and collage. Overlapping ovoids stack...
Stories Told Through Skin
5 works
Skin is a record that keeps itself. It takes a mark and holds on to it, and the mark carries no evidence of where it came from. A scar, a line of age, a tattoo, a monogram: the surface treats them all the same way. Five large works on paper, roughly two by two and a half feet, navy drawn across warm sand and blush grounds in mixed media, cut paper and ink. The paper is doing the same job. It is a surface that accept...
A Place For Our Thoughts
Public Art · Pflugerville Public Library, Pflugerville, Texas
Our collective human memory is a multigenerational collection of minds. A vast collection that connects all of us through time, space, and meaning. Our minds are physical places where these memories exist during our lives. We live on through our ideas and stories that we share and that others carry and later pass on. Knowledge is transferred through generations, through a long line of people. This knowledge is advan...
Stories We Tell Ourselves
4 works
In my series "Stories We Tell Ourselves," I explore the intersection of fiction and reality through the lens of science fiction. Specifically, I delve into the fictional cultures depicted in these stories, using small paintings as studies for larger works. The allure of fictional cultures within the science fiction genre lies in their ability to simultaneously captivate and challenge our understanding of the world. T...
Protean Particle Panoply
5 works
Protean Particle Panoply is a cluster of digital painting collages that work at the threshold of visibility, where a structure is too small to see and still has to solve the same problems as a building. Radiolarian skeletons, cellular membranes, tissue cross-sections, the self-organizing geometries of single-celled organisms: forms whose hexagonal lattices, branching networks and spherical symmetries are the structur...
This Is Not Art
Installation · documentation only
Grey primer, glow in the dark spray paint and black permanent marker on canvas, with a fluorescent black light. Dimensions variable. E gallery, the graduate project space at the University of Texas at San Antonio, September 2010. Five canvases, five sentences, each sentence the title of the canvas it is written on. This is not Art. Is it aways about Art. No one can be an artist if no one knows what Art is. If you ca...
7 Levels For Truth & Balance
Installation · documentation only
A.K.A. "Your Phantom Captain's Seven Level Quest For Truth & Balance Thru Understanding Of Phi" Lights, motors, plastic skeletons, fabric, plastic bags. Variable sizes, life-sized figures. Shown in We Are Not The Only Ones, a two person MFA thesis exhibition with Bora Lee, UTSA Satellite Space, 115 Blue Star, San Antonio, 2 to 19 December 2010. This installation explored consciousness, truth, and balance through th...
Hives, Bombs & Jellyfish
17 works, 16 published
Random actions and gestural elements constitutes exploration of formal artistic problems in my work. The random actions become formalistic elements that create shapes and lines which repeat to give balance and/or harmony. The Gestures are motivated by discovery and exploration of aesthetic value. They emerge with the use of gesticulatory line and color, making me the conduit and interpreter of what the aesthetic can ...
+10 moreA marked year means work from that series is published here. Series with no statement are catalogued but not yet written up.