My work is a constant search for the best way to interpret the ideas that I have about myself and the world I live in. I do not limit myself to one medium, style, or concept. I am a sculptor, a painter, a furniture maker, a fashion designer, an artist.
When I paint or create sculptures I feel like I am having a conversation with the medium used at the moment, the textile tells me where it wants to be placed. The interaction with the brush strokes tells me what shapes, directions and intensity of each stroke. I am just the translator between the medium and the subject.
Having an interaction with the medium I am using to create art is very important for me as an artist. Having a connection with the subject is also very meaningful, as they help create scenes and interiors that I, as a black-latin person, was never able to see myself in. I am creating a fantasy that the rest of the world could never see me living in it, taking inspiration from the Renaissance movement and its architecture, in conjunction with architecture, interior design, and decor motifs from the 1980s and 90s New York Black Latino community. As I travel the world and meet people from other cultures they often have the wrong impression of my background and culture; as I create art, I will be able change people’s view towards my background and culture.
As a multidisciplinary artist, I find inspiration in nature, history and social problems. One of my latest projects included an investigation on the use of cotton and textiles for slave trade. During the trade triangle, African slaves were traded for Indian textiles and transported to the Caribbean and to the south of the United States. In response, I created sculptures using discarded material and textiles , making tents to provide shelter in public places, and covering found furniture to create shelter and give objects a new life.
There is also a time-based quality to the physicality found in my work. By working across multiple pieces at once, documenting and recording my experiences, memory and emotional responses to the subject means that what lies beneath is sometimes subdued or intentionally hidden. I am compelled by what might be revealed and obscured by this approach. These compilations, with imagery and text sometimes masked, develop over time. Marks made today require a response to the mark of yesterday.
In this way, I try to build a perspective of the baroque Afro-Caribbean identity, product of inheritances and manifests, rooted in our popular diasporic imaginary, through a very particular investigation in a crossroads of traditions inside and outside the territory, proposing a disruptive speech of Caribbean modernity, loaded with elements of our miscegenation. For the Caribbean is a cultural mosaic of languages and behavior so diverse.