What is my work about?
I make Plein Aire paintings of my dreams and what I see around me. Sleep coupled with reality, produces beautiful yet irrational imagery. The only way I can interpret these experiences is by painting. My paintings are dream journals exploring the embarrassing parts of sub-conscious thought. My work is conceived of in one sitting much like an action painting. When I attain a certain resonance with the one ft sq. field paintings, I blow them up to six ft. sq. without a projector. The justification for scale enhancement is simply to have my field of vision consumed by my painting.
Artist Statement
My observational paintings search for a ritual of cultural self-determination. Growing up Mexican, Native American and Spanish meant for me inventing new forms out of a loss of personal pre-Columbian memory. I retrieve this memory with conscious and unconscious methods. Painting outdoors helps me directly scout the American landscape for scenes to cast in my narratives. And what I’ve learned painting nature is brought inside exploring my dreams. The irrational, mythological and everyday emerge from dreams onto my canvas like a landscape. I allow myself to become possessed by my American history and to exorcise the ghosts of my past through painting. I wish to complicate rather than generalize the experience of being Indigenous to the United States.
The Hudson River school of painters and the Nouveau realists propagated a colonizers gaze of America. In Frederic Edwin Church’s “The Heart of the Andes”, a romanticized exotic landscape is bathed in an alluring Western light. I want to turn this nature imagery from our collective unconscious that manifested the destiny of settlers to come west towards an introspective gaze. This introspection revolves around questions of powerlessness, dreams and reality. I go back and forth between believing our imagination presides first over consciousness versus consciousness always repressing and expressing its own will. In some ways I am searching for a fluid freedom between a narrative aware of itself and intuition intimately mingled in my mind. My hope is not to insist my audiences’ appetites change but allow them the space to see how belief has affected our lives.
CV
EDUCATION
2014 MFA Columbia University, School of the Arts, New York
2010 BFA The Cooper Union, School of the Arts, New York
PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE
2014-2013
Teach Assisting @ Columbia University: Diana Cooper + Patricia Treib
Assisted in teaching painting and drawing at an Ivy League University. My first TA assignment for drawing wove traditional approaches with installation. Diana Cooper acclimated my teaching style to employ stream of consciousness in drawing . And Patricia Treib’s curriculum implemented a rigor from the basics of oil painting. By starting the students with only limited chromatic palettes, painting became a down to earth method. As the students progressed out of a limited palette, Patricia allowed me to teach the students to experiment through observational painting.
GROUP EXHIBITIONS
2014
Thesis Exhibition, Emily Fisher Landau Center for Arts, LIC., NY.
2014
Networking tips for shy People, Livingston Gallery, Brooklyn, NY.
2013
1st year Show, Wallach Gallery, Columbia University, New York
2013
Magical Thinking, Livingston Street Gallery, Brooklyn, New York
2010
Group Drawing Show, Tompkins Projects, Brooklyn, New York
Powers That Be, 41 Cooper Union Gallery, New York, New York
Salon Dion, The Cave, Brooklyn, New York
2009
Capsule, 7th floor Cooper Union Gallery, New York, New York
2007
Simulacrum, School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts
AWARDS
2015
Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation Grantee
2013
Robert Gamblin Painting Grant
2013
Martin Birnbaum Scholarship, Columbia University
2013
D’Arcy Hayman Scholarship, Columbia University
2013
Betty Lee and and Aaron Stern Fellowship, Columbia University
2009
William Randolph Hearst Scholarship, The Cooper Union
2007
Full Tuition Scholarship, The Cooper Union
2007
Medici Society Scholarship, School of the Museum of Fine Arts
RESIDENCIES
2014
Byrdcliffe Residency, Woodstock, NY.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
2014
New American Painters MFA, April Issue, Boston, MA.
2013
Prioleau, Chris. Apogee Journal, Issue Two (April 2013): Front cover – Back cover art.
2011
Cooper Union Administration, Course Catalog, Spring 2011, pg. 46
2008
Cooper Union Administration, At Cooper (Fall 2008 )Back Cover.
2007
The Boston Globe: sideKick, “I Love You Mary Jane”, cover
2005
The Denver Post: yourhub.com section, “Masked…”, cover.