nineteen sixty nine: an ethnic studies journal

My art practice is informed by reverse ethnography, explores themes from my own personal biography, and is explicitly political. It utilizes my personal experience as a lens onto the persistent effects of social institutions and cultural practices on the individual. Immigration, AIDS, and queer identity are at the forefront of my work. Through my practice, I aim not only able to reclaim my personal narrative, but to creatively reconstruct history. I do this through the reassembly of imagery: colonial propaganda, indigenous codexes, consumer print media. Additionally, I create new iconography presenting alternative and relevant understandings of colonialism, culture, and sex.Using printmaking I recreated religious imagery, mimicking the same process of documentation through printmaking originally used by the Catholic Church to disseminate their religious ideas.  Using these same tools, my work proposed a critique of religious institutions and social control. I highlighted the condemned and the excluded by drawing together homosexuality and Pre­Columbian artifacts in a hybrid form. These objects and images are clearly personal, but they also speak to broader issues that are relevant today. Belonging to a population that is often excluded and condemned, printmaking became a response to the exclusionary history books, religious propaganda populating my upbringing.