“Borders are set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them. A border is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge. A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition. The prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants.” ― Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza
For the past twenty years, I have investigated the effect and impact of homesickness through the creation of non-traditional physical spaces, their meaning, and the new ways that they can be reinterpreted. As an interdisciplinary artist focusing on performance art, installation, and photography, these spaces containing displaced (objects, bodies, and garments) have been used to reimagine personal and external narratives and as a process of unfolding the strains of systemic invisibility and exclusion.
My approach to art-making comes from inquiry, research, and intergenerational collaboration. Subjects and references drafted from domesticity, labor, and self-determination are often used not only to question but to disrupt narratives that perpetuate and idealize the invisibility of black and brown bodies, institutionally, particularly through the commodification of such.