My work, largely influenced by my background in architecture, reflects on the ways in which place making, cultural mobility and belonging manifest in the built environment. Through the lens of place making, which I define as the way individuals or groups employ tangible or intangible resources to build a sense of attachment at a specific place, my work ponders on the personal and political layers interwoven within the architectures that shape us socially––from the domestic space to the public realm.
Documentation serves as a point of departure in my practice. Engaging with seriality and indexicality, I use casting, embossing, drawing, photography, and storytelling as a means of recording, to construct sculptures and installations that respond to specific sites. My past work has captured the visual, architectural, and aesthetic codes of Mexican neighborhoods in Chicago, and critically examined how political boundaries impose constraints, creating widespread social disruption and forcing new forms of adaptability that extend beyond its immediate surroundings. My own domestic space has also become a site of inquiry, where I use latex casts to capture imprints of surfaces, revealing the accumulation of time and memory within architecture.
Materiality is central to my practice—concrete, latex, clay and paper, among other materials, are used in their pure, unaltered forms to explore their inherent properties and cultural associations. I further extend this approach by incorporating structures and construction hardware as the display apparatus. These components reinforce spatial relationships, grounding the work in the built environment while emphasizing its impermanence and transformation.
