I think my relationship to making art really changed during grad school, when I began to realize that I had been hiding behind my work rather than using it to understand myself. I had a lot of experiences within my life that I had never really given myself the space to unpack, and making art became a way for those things to naturally surface. I became interested in what happened when I made art without a specific motive or the pressure of trying to make something “good.” I noticed that the work often became like an encrypted file of my own personhood, revealing things about myself that I hadn’t consciously recognized. Certain symbols, images, and environments would keep resurfacing, and through making, I could begin to understand why I was holding onto them. Painting became a way of having a conversation with myself, untangling experiences and feelings that I hadn’t fully processed. It shifted my understanding of art from simply making an image to creating a space where I could discover something about myself.

Pablo Picasso once said, “It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child,” and I think about that a lot. I think one of the hardest parts of making art is learning how to get out of your own way. There’s a certain point where having the technical knowledge to make a painting work can actually become a barrier to making something that feels instinctive and true to you. I tend to think of a painting as an equation, where every decision affects the balance of the whole image. Some things fall into place naturally, while others can throw everything off. There’s a rational process involved in figuring out what makes a painting work, but at the same time, I have to leave room for things that might not make sense logically, to follow an impulse without immediately questioning it. I think painting is a lot like dancing. You’re constantly making adjustments, but there’s a point where you find a rhythm and stop consciously thinking about every movement. I’m always trying to find that sweet spot where the structure is there, but it doesn’t interfere with the freedom of expression.

I think material limitations and technical challenges often push me outside the boundaries of what I’m comfortable with, and that can open up entirely new directions in my practice. Last year, for example, I wanted to create an installation even though my background was primarily in painting. I had very little experience with sound design or video, but by experimenting with those mediums, I was able to create an experience that evoked a very potent and specific feeling in people that I hadn’t been able to achieve through painting alone.
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I think of different materials as different elements I can use to build a world. Sometimes the medium you’re working with isn’t necessarily the best vehicle for what you’re trying to communicate, and exploring something unfamiliar can reveal a much more natural way to get there. There’s also a certain freedom in not knowing what you’re doing yet. When you’re a beginner, you don’t have the same expectations of yourself, so you can let go of the pressure to get everything right and approach the process with more playfulness and curiosity. I think some of the most interesting discoveries happen when I’m willing to experiment without knowing exactly where I’ll end up.

I definitely believe that the work belongs to the audience once it’s completed, and I don’t mind when people interpret it differently from how I originally intended. I think that’s one of the most rewarding parts of making art. You never know how someone might relate to something deeply personal to you, or what it might evoke in their own imagination or allow them to recognize about themselves.
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I once had a friend tell me that she was always surprised by my work because, in person, I’m a pretty happy and extroverted person, but my paintings seemed to reveal a deeper sadness or intensity that she wouldn’t necessarily associate with me. The work can communicate parts of my inner world that aren’t necessarily apparent, or that I might never speak about. Regardless of how someone interprets it, I feel that something meaningful has already happened in the act of putting that part of myself out there while communicating things I might not know how to express any other way, so there's something beautiful about being seen, even if not necessarily understood.

I think I would want people to come away from my work with a sense of the magic and mythology that can exist in everyday life, even within experiences of pain and suffering. I’ve always been interested in personal mythology and the idea that we can reclaim our own experiences by shaping them into a narrative that makes sense to us. A lot of my work draws from difficult or traumatic experiences, but I often depict them through intensely colorful, almost fantastical imagery. I’m less interested in recreating exactly what happened than in capturing how an experience registered within me, because I think that subjective reality can be just as meaningful, if not more so, than the literal events themselves.
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That same idea extends to seemingly ordinary moments, too. In one painting, I depicted my dad’s old car parked outside our family home in Florida. The original photograph was taken over a decade ago on an ordinary, gloomy day, but when I returned to that memory years later, it had taken on a completely different significance. I painted the scene with a brilliant blue sky, luminous green grass, and sunlight reflecting off the car, because that was how the memory felt to me looking back. I think I want people to consider how the meaning of an experience can change over time, and how something that once seemed mundane, or even painful, can eventually become meaningful in ways we couldn’t have anticipated.

My personal experiences have had a huge influence on my practice, particularly my relationship to my Mexican roots and spirituality. Growing up in predominantly white spaces in the United States, I often felt like these parts of my life belonged to a completely different world from the one I was navigating day to day. I kept that side of myself separate, and it wasn’t until my MFA that I began questioning why I had never really allowed it into my work.

I started revisiting experiences that had profoundly shaped me, including an intense, transformative ayahuasca ceremony in Mexico when I was 17, alongside the spiritual beliefs and traditions I grew up around through my family. Exploring these experiences opened up questions about how we understand reality and how something can be meaningful even when it falls outside what we can easily explain. I became interested in how to give visual form to experiences that don’t have an obvious reference in the physical world, or that are difficult to articulate through language. I’ve always been drawn to the presence of spirituality and the supernatural in Mexican culture, from Catholic imagery to folklore about spirits, monsters, and otherworldly beings. I think this also informs my interest in personal mythology, which has been shaped in part by reading Carlos Castaneda’s Don Juan books. I’m drawn to the way these books blur the boundaries between the ordinary and the extraordinary, and question whether an experience needs to be objectively verifiable to hold meaning. That influence comes through in my paintings’ dreamlike environments, spiritual symbolism, and fantastical imagery that often exists just one step away from reality.

I’ve always wanted to make a full-length film that draws on my own experiences but reimagines them through a surrealist lens. I love the idea of having an entire storyline to build a world around, with its own atmosphere, characters, music, and visual language. Something that begins in a reality people recognize but gradually moves into the fantastical, where spirituality, mythology, and the strange things that make up our inner lives can exist alongside the everyday. It wouldn’t be autobiographical in a literal sense, but it would carry the emotional truth of my experiences.

This is part of why I love Carlos Castaneda’s Don Juan series so much. I love that people still debate whether the events actually happened, whether Don Juan was a real person, or whether any of it could be possible. I’m drawn to that ambiguity, where you don’t have to settle the question of what’s real and what’s imagined. I want to explore that space in my own work and let someone experience it through a story, sound, and moving images, rather than asking them to take it in through a single frame.

I think my desire to make art has always been tied to wanting to be seen in a deeper way that goes beyond how people know me in everyday life. I wouldn’t need the story to be a literal account of my life, or for someone to interpret it exactly as I intended. I’d want them to spend time inside a world shaped by my experiences and imagination, and to have their own experience of it. For me, that would be a way of sharing something deeply personal without having to reduce it to a story about myself.

For me, the photograph became a metaphor for the external standards of reality and acceptability that I had already internalized and was unconsciously reproducing in my art. It gave me something concrete to work from, a fixed image that could be judged as accurate, aesthetically pleasing, or technically successful. I was looking outward for a version of reality that I could reproduce convincingly, rather than trusting my own experience as a valid starting point. It was only as I began unpacking my practice that I understood how deeply this impulse was connected to the way I had learned to navigate the world. I had spent much of my life concealing major parts of myself that didn’t fit neatly into the environment I grew up in, separating cultural or spiritual aspects of my identity and internal world that felt difficult to reconcile with the person I was expected to be. I began to recognize that I was doing something similar in my paintings, prioritizing what looked right and what could be understood from the outside while suppressing what was actually happening within me.

I don’t think of photography itself as inherently colonial or oppressive, but to me there is a kind of erasure that happens when the surface becomes the whole story. In my own practice, the photograph had become a kind of cage because of the authority I had given it. It represented a way of thinking in which what was visible and verifiable took precedence over what was felt, remembered, or experienced internally. A photograph can document the physical matrix of a moment, but it cannot determine the full meaning of that moment for the person who lived it. I became interested in the space between those two things: the external world we can observe and the individual reality each of us experiences within it. Memory, emotion, imagination, and spirituality are also huge parts of our reality, even when they can’t be verified through an image or easily articulated in words. I wanted those experiences to have the same legitimacy in my paintings as anything I could see in front of me, rather than treating the photograph as the authority and my painting as an interpretation of it. Ultimately, this shift became about reclaiming my own perspective, and with it, the value of my own personhood outside the expectations of the environment I grew up in. I’m not trying to deny what happened or argue against the value of documenting the physical world. I’m questioning why the literal appearance of something should have more authority than the way it is experienced and integrated into our lives.

The architectural spaces came out of my desire to draw from an experience that had profoundly affected me but was almost impossible to translate visually. I wanted to revisit a life-altering ayahuasca ceremony I had participated in when I was seventeen. Although it was an incredibly intense experience, it wasn’t very visual for me. Nothing about my physical surroundings had changed. The experience was entirely internal, and I knew that trying to create a definitive image to represent it would feel limiting. Instead of trying to illustrate what happened, I wanted to focus on what it felt like. I began stripping the paintings down to their bare bones, using architecture, color, and shape to convey something that didn’t have a clear visual reference.

I think of a room as a container. In dream interpretation, houses and buildings are often understood as representations of one’s consciousness, and I was drawn to the idea of a physical structure holding something psychological or spiritual. The room gave me a consistent framework to work within without requiring me to construct a particular narrative or sequence of events. There’s something inviting about a room that you can step into or feel immersed in, especially when the work is large-scale. Because there’s nothing for your brain to decode or figure out, but the environment itself is so familiar, there’s an invitation for presence and stillness. With my more complex or intricate paintings, there’s often more to unpack, contemplate, or interpret. But when I’m working primarily with light and color, those elements can bypass the need to make sense of something first. You can experience the work without needing to understand it. A lot of my visual language comes from experimenting with how much of an experience needs to be made visible for its emotional reality to come through.