Mama, Soy Artista…

“Very early in my life it was too late”

The house was both my sanctuary and my prison, a small, crumbling structure where the hallow walls witnessed the unraveling of my childhood. It was more than just a structure, it was the first sight of my undoing and of my becoming. 

Before I was to face the world at large that hummed outside its walls, it was my testing grounds where I learned to see beyond the surface of reality, beyond the veil and uncover the unseen forces that shaped my world. 

It was there in that broken house, consumed by darkness and despair, that I was cast by fire and beaten to strength. 

Before anything else, I had to survive. 

The house demanded resilience, it had its own logic and sense of time. It was more of a portal or a realm than it was a structure or a shelter. Things never made any sense, time moved differently, apparitions and paranormal activity was common, fear and anxiety was foundational, the darkness was thick and the air was always heavy. It was there in my solitude that I learned to confront my fears and alter my perception, the ability to read what was unspoken, to sense what lies beneath, to navigate the visible and invisible without losing myself in the process. 

I never wanted to be strong, of course, I always wanted to be like a flower. Soft, delicate, fragile. 

I wanted to open myself up to the world, naturally and unapologetically. 

I dreamed of being carried away by merciful summer winds; my descent, graceful and forgiving. 

When I find myself on the ground, inevitably crushed by the world that was always so much larger and stronger than I, 

I wanted my forgiveness to leave a fragrant scent behind, a beautiful farewell for the world I dared to touch. 

Of course this was just a dream.

My room, my solitary space within that house, became my cocoon. There, I could paint, listen to music, and dream of a world far removed from the one I was trapped in. The house, with its cracked windows, peeling paint, ominous energy and cold darkness that filled the rooms, felt alive. It was haunted, not just by the spirits that wandered its halls, but by the trauma of a family broken and shattered both collectively and individually. The house, in all its decay, became a symbol of my past, who I was and who I was trying to escape from.

For too long I thought I was just another ghost wandering its halls, waiting to dissolve into the shadows. But the house had other plans for me, it didn’t let me fade. Instead, it forged me, rough and unfinished, like iron beaten against fire. It whispered that the real journey was waiting beyond its walls, where I’d face trials that no amount of strength could prepare me for. The hero's journey does not begin at the moment of departure. But rather it begins in the place one must first outgrow. 

And so, before I could become the artist, the seeker and the storyteller, I had to first understand who I was beneath it all before I could reveal myself to the world.

…

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One of the most recurring motifs in my practice, and within my personal mythology, is my childhood home. Although it was a place where I spent most of my life, it never felt purely physical. It functioned more as a realm or portal, a space that held multiple emotional and psychological realities at once.


My bedroom was a sanctuary. It was where I could create, retreat, and exist outside the demands of the world. The house itself, however, carried a different energy. It was dark, volatile, and felt like a constant battleground. At the same time, it was the site of numerous spiritual encounters and life-altering dreams throughout my childhood and adolescence. These experiences deeply shaped my inner world, yet remained largely unspoken, another central part of my story that I had kept hidden.


The Nights…



The Nights extends my exploration of liminality into a time-based, immersive format. While much of my painted work approaches transformation through memory, intuition, and interior states, this video engages the disorienting and often darker terrain of transition, where orientation is unstable and meaning is not immediately accessible.


The work was filmed in my childhood neighborhood during the early hours of the morning, using first-person perspective to situate the viewer inside an experience of searching rather than observation. Familiar domestic spaces appear altered and unreachable, emphasizing the psychological distance that can exist even within known environments. Sound plays a central role in anchoring the work, weaving together breath, music, and unedited voicemails from my family. These voices function less as narrative devices and more as emotional coordinates, signaling care, concern, and connection amid dislocation.


Rather than offering resolution through clarity or explanation, The Nights moves toward moments of stillness and light, allowing love and relational presence to emerge as grounding forces. The video resists linear storytelling in favor of atmosphere, duration, and repetition, reflecting how periods of transition are often lived, not understood.


Installation view

The Nights… (installation view), projection, ceramics, video, 6m 01s, 2025



The accompanying installation situates the video in dialogue with a sculptural rendering of my childhood home. By projecting moving images and text onto the ceramic structure, the house becomes both a physical object and a psychological site, holding memory, absence, and presence simultaneously. The figure projected onto the façade hovers between inhabitant and apparition, reinforcing the sense of being caught between states of becoming.



Although the work was created just months before my father’s passing, his voice within the piece has since taken on a new resonance. This temporal shift has deepened the work’s relationship to thresholds and transformation, allowing it to hold multiple meanings at once without being retroactively redefined by loss. In this way, The Nights operates as a living component of my thesis, one that continues to evolve alongside my own understanding of transition, memory, and care.

RE: TURNING, ANNA-MARIA AND STEPHEN KELLEN GALLERY,66 5TH AVE, NEW YORK, 2025.

Those Who Grew Up In Burning Houses Think The World Is On Fire, 11”x16”x12”, ceramics, 2025

During my MFA I came to understand something that changed the entire direction of my practice, not as a formal revelation but as a slow and uncomfortable reckoning with what I had been doing and why.


The frameworks I had internalized for what constituted good painting (technical mastery, photographic accuracy, the well-executed composition) were not neutral aesthetic standards. They were epistemological ones. They determined what counted as legitimate knowledge, what deserved to be rendered, and what had to be translated into a legible form before it could exist on a canvas. I had been operating entirely within those frameworks without questioning them, producing work that was accomplished by every conventional measure and almost entirely evacuated of anything that was actually true about me.


What I hadn’t yet understood was that those frameworks were the same ones that had shaped my self-perception for my entire life. Growing up Mexican and impoverished in a predominantly white environment, I had learned to make myself legible; to present only what the world around me could process without discomfort, and to suppress everything else. My cultural identity, my spirituality, my illness, my interior life — all of it had been managed and concealed so automatically that the concealment had stopped feeling like a choice. It had become the architecture of how I moved through the world. And it had migrated directly into my studio practice, where the photograph functioned as the ultimate instrument of that same logic: capturing the surface, imposing legibility, excluding everything that couldn’t be reproduced.


When I began to understand this connection, that the framework I had internalized as a person and the epistemological framework I had internalized as a painter were not two separate problems but one, everything shifted. I spent two years undoing both simultaneously. In my practice this meant abandoning photographic reference entirely and learning to use memory, intuition, and spiritual perception as my primary instruments. In my life it meant developing a writing practice; learning to say what was true before I could paint what was true, posting it publicly before I could close the app, exercising vulnerability as a discipline until it stopped feeling like exposure and started feeling like accuracy.

These were not separate processes. They were the same decolonial act performed in two different registers at the same time.

I chose this experience as my subject for a specific reason: it was the one experience in my life for which no photographic reference existed or could exist. There was no document of what happened in that jungle, no image of what it felt like to undergo that ceremony at seventeen while carrying a leukemia diagnosis, alongside my mother and my aunt who is a shaman. The only instrument capable of recording what actually occurred was my own perception. Choosing this as my subject and abandoning photographic reference were therefore not two separate decisions — they were the same decision. The subject made the methodology inevitable.


Making this the centerpiece of a public thesis exhibition also meant I could no longer keep it private. I had to articulate it repeatedly, to strangers, over months. That was part of the intention. The work forced a reckoning with the concealment itself — not by resolving it but by making it unsustainable. That is what I mean when I say the work and the life were changing simultaneously. The paintings were not a record of a transformation that had already happened. They were the process of transformation, made visible.



The Waiting Room

This architecture emerged from a specific perceptual experience during my ayahuasca ceremony: a space that was simultaneously interior and exterior, partially open, lit by only candles and suspended between enclosure and exposure. That physical reality became the template for an architectural language I have returned to repeatedly in my painting practice.


This space is less about a specific place than a precise moment: the instant before irreversible change, when something is already in motion and cannot be stopped. It is a threshold defined not by its walls but entirely by its exit. The stillness of the waiting room only exists because what comes next is inevitable, and that imminence is what gives the space its particular quality of suspension and clarity.




Formally, these paintings are almost entirely investigations of light. Built through thin, translucent layers of oil, the luminosity is not applied but accumulated — light that feels like it is emanating from within the canvas rather than falling on its surface. A faculty mentor once observed that one of the most consistent threads across my entire practice was my relationship to light and how I perceive it. I didn’t fully understand what she meant until I started making these paintings. The waiting room gave me a fixed architectural container within which I could focus almost entirely on that investigation — stripping away figure and complex composition to render only what was most essential to the experience: the quality of light in a space that exists between worlds.
What interests me about this architecture is that it recurs. It is not a memory I am illustrating or a scene I am reconstructing. It is a psychological and spiritual state I recognize across radically different experiences, one that produces the same sensation each time: time stretching, perception sharpening, the self stepping briefly outside of itself. The waiting room is where that state lives. I keep building it because I keep returning to it.




“I’m not trying to recreate a scene or a moment like a memory that can be recalled on demand. It’s not about what was seen, but what was felt, what was lived in that moment, even if I can’t explain it. The truth is, it becomes almost impossible to separate what actually happened from what was imagined, dreamed, or projected. But at a certain point, that distinction stops mattering. The emotional and energetic imprint is the truth.”




Mi Tia La Shamana

My aunt has always been central to my healing and spiritual formation. From a young age, she offered guidance on intuition, emotional awareness, and accepting life’s fluctuations with wisdom and strength. During my illness, I had near-daily consultations with her. She prepared concoctions, herbal bathing infusions, and guided me through regressive hypnosis as part of that care.


She occupies a role in my life similar to Don Juan, a guide, teacher, and threshold figure. She represents a part of my life that existed almost exclusively in Mexico. Growing up in a small town in Florida, I learned to make myself small, to remain quiet and out of place. In Mexico, I became an apprentice, rooted, attentive, and connected to lineage. These two worlds felt separate for much of my life, and her presence bridged that divide.

About ten years ago, I made a small painting of my aunt as a gesture of gratitude for everything she had given me. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but ever since, every time I see her, she brings it up. She tells me how much she loves it, how people always comment on how much it feels like her, how it captures her essence rather than just her appearance. That response stayed with me.


When I began developing my thesis work, I kept thinking about that painting and why it resonated so deeply. It became the starting point for what I now think of as “aura portraits.” In remaking her portrait, I wasn’t interested in depicting her as she appears in a photograph, but in painting how I experience her. This became an exercise in moving away from photographic reference and toward memory, intuition, and felt presence, allowing the painting to function as a record of perception rather than likeness.

Alongside my relationship with my aunt, The Teachings of Don Juan by Carlos Castaneda became an important point of reference for my thinking and my practice. Many of the ideas in the book series around perception, intuition, and non-ordinary reality mirrored teachings I had already absorbed growing up, especially within the context of native spiritual traditions. Rather than introducing something new, the text helped me recognize a framework for experiences I had already lived but never had language for.


What resonated most was the emphasis on experiential knowledge over explanation, and the idea that transformation does not need to be rationalized to be real. This has deeply shaped how I approach my work. I am less concerned with whether an image comes from memory, imagination, or something more intangible, and more interested in the emotional and energetic truth it carries. The book affirmed my instinct to work from intuition, personal mythology, and liminal states, allowing my process to remain open, fluid, and guided by feeling rather than certainty.




“Don Juan introduces Carlos to non-ordinary reality a realm that
exists alongside the everyday, but that can only be accessed
through feeling, intuition, and surrender.


Carlos, being a Western academic, keeps trying to measure and
rationalize everything. During one psychedelic experience, he
swears he turned into a crow and flew through the sky. But then
he immediately doubts himself, asking Don Juan, “Was I really a
bird? Would anyone else have seen it?” and Don Juan says:


you’re missing the point. It’s not about whether it was
objectively real, it’s about what you experienced. It’s about what
you know now, even if you can’t explain it.”

RE: TURNING, ANNA-MARIA AND STEPHEN KELLEN GALLERY, 66 5TH AVE, NEW YORK, 2025.