50.5”x50.5”
Mixed media on wood panel
The land the people the oil the killing the sky the people the prairie the boom the sky the pipes the buffalo the people the buildings the people the sunsets the massacre the oil & the drilling the art the trees the money the city the mother the road and the people.
SEARCHING-AMERICA-RESILIENT-IN PROGRESS-DETOUR-HOPEFUL-STUBBORN-DISTANT-DEFIANT-ALONE-HOMELESS- REDEEMED AND SUBSCRIBED.
Inspired by Andrew Wyeth’s 1948 painting Christina’s World.
58”x35.5”
Spray Enamel, acrylic and graphite on corrugated cardboard box.
2023
46”x38”
Mixed media on sheet metal and wooden frame
“ The furniture of the street, practices broken, diligent. The space, the people, the things in our way. All the things, bothered by the order. The breath taken, an articulation of our misunderstanding. “
42.5” x 59”
Acrylic, graphite and spray paint on Arches paper
Taking a detour from my own, on-going artistic exploration, I decided to approach this work as an opportunity to comment on the function of art in the life of our city and our shared experience as a community. In a time when we seem to have lost sight of the things that define us as people, art raises its voice. Detour 2020 is inspired in the home-made signs one would find at demonstrations and political rallies. Art itself protesting and claiming a place in our lives – no time for decoration, or contemplative meanderings. I wanted this piece to be direct and raw, the words calling attention to who we are by connecting us to our time and our place. Above all, I call upon the people both as operators and customers of the society we are building together.
A safety cone stands defiant at the center of the piece as a warning, a detour, a symbol of a work in progress and a marker showing us the way. This is what art does and I wanted to remind us all that without art we are lost.
This piece is also available as an animated NFT and is on auction on rarible.com. View NFT here
“Detour 2020” was commissioned by the Mayfest organization as the featured image for the festival’s 2020 edition.
"Signs of Materiality" contemplates the definitive nature of "the object" as a presence in and of itself while questioning the spectators' tendency to read all art as representational, symbolic or referential. I want to produce objects that are brutally direct and specific. This work questions notions of "meaning" and "story-telling" by making it evident that it is the viewer who constructs and attaches meaning and narrative to the work in their own arbitrary manner. Materiality is the result of my on-going exploration of the origin of language and the nature of human communications in the context of the built environment. These compositions are both "familiar" as well as shamelessly abstract and disconnected. The work is inspired by automatic poetry, industrialism, brutalist architecture and my own commercial design practice.
All pieces in this series are enamel paint on plasma-cut 0.016 steel
With ironic titles like “Kiss” and “Present”, I want to show that these “packages” wrapped in shiny plastic are anything but gifts. The idea of Warhol’s, iconic Campbells soup can or familiar consumer goods brands returning to their humble yet destructive origin as trash shows how these membranes contain a record of our experience as consumers of products, as well as of culture.
A chair as the smallest humanly inhabitable space. Places, time and space entangled to ulterior specificity. with their own stories and symbolism insisting in pulling us in.
I wanted to get to know these forms; to see if I could take these simple and primitive markings and infuse them with meaning and emotion. The idea of taking such basic gestures and transforming them into “stories” through a process that is both rudimentary and sophisticated is what drives this work.
Much like in my other life as a graphic designer, I have created a series of raw, “viable options” and taken each one through a production process involving scale, form, volume and texture. It was during the physical production of these pieces, that I began to discover the stories and ideas that each mark could potentially (perhaps arbitrarily) convey, thus I got a bit closer to understanding that this may be how conventional communication works.
Found object intervention. Poured latex over painted ceramic figures. Innocent, kitsch, vane, grotesque, scenes of our own demise, that highlight our unsustainable, oil based economy and its effect on us and our natural environment.
Collaboration with design retailer Edit and furniture manufacturer FLUX. Several artists were selected to produce unique interventions of this iconic, origami-inspired chair. Graffiti style spray paint, pigments and iconography were applied to the “inside” of the chair in a controlled manner to ensure precise alignment of the graphics when the chair is assembled.
The piece title “Ritual For Titans / Slow Time Machine” was also carefully painted directly on the material to ensure that it was only fully visible on the seat of the chair.
2006
Acrylic and graphite on plywood panel
46” x 39”
Same revolution again. Inspired by anti-government street demonstrations in Mexico City and Caracas, Venezuela.
Dyptic. Acrylic and Graphite on panels
24”x60”
1987
Acrylic and charcoal on paper
36” x 22”
66” x18”
Spray enamel, acrylic and graphite on plywood
1998
