I listen in on the conversations between words I encounter and the images I imagine.
My drawings, paintings, and books tie together the threads of my personal experiences and sociopolitical issues. I reflect on my personal experiences of poverty, discrimination, homelessness, growing up in an immigrant household, and disruptions in my family and education to explore how these experiences intersect with their historical and sociopolitical expressions and contexts, and shape who I am.
My intent is to stimulate reflection, discussion, and examination of the impacts of sociopolitical institutions and systems on individuals, specifically vulnerable populations.
My artistic process begins with writing personal narratives and poetry that become sources for me to interpret or amend into visual representations. Historical, sociological, and visual research provide further inspiration for the process of creating my work. Subjects and elements in my work often function as symbolic representations of the idea and emotions evoked by my written pieces.
The writing is rarely literately translated into a visual representation, but instead through a process of association translated into figurative and metaphorical representations that contain subjects and elements laden with personal, cultural, spiritual, and mythological meanings. Sometimes, the work stands alone visually. At other times, the work stands with the written text in a unity. However, the space between the text and image is where the audience both as viewer and reader is invited to experience the themes of my work, and to contribute their insights.
