“(mis)Taken,” 2025, cochineal-dyed muslin, iron ink sourced from metal scraps in Arizona, screenprinted archival border maps: boundary between the United States and Mexico: agreed upon by the Joint Commission under the Treaty of December 30, 1853, 3 ft. x 135 ft. Photo credit: Emily Dormier.
Windgate-Lamar Fellowship
2025
Memory serves as the foundation of our identity, history, and universe. It condenses time, showing that we exist simultaneously in the past, present, and future. My work reckons with memory, emphasizing the materials of my history and how they are grounded in time and place: how being a bi-racial, Mexican American, disabled woman has shaped my life.
I am a child of the diaspora stretched between. Raised in my mother's white suburbia, I lived separated geographically and genealogically from my paternal family and the land we call home in Mexico. Externally, here in the United States, I am viewed as foreign. Internally, my immune system cannot tell self from foreign invaders, attacking my body. My disability and race demand a constant awareness of self and the space I inhabit.
My work is a record marking the “memory fields” along my timeline: a term coined by Jake Skeets that renames memory as a spatiotemporal entity, acknowledging that time, memory, and land are inseparable. I pull from the official archives of record and the archives of kinship and body to form my memory fields by embedding temporal geographies into the work. One way I utilize material is with natural dyes. Cochineal is a dye I return to for its historical meaning utilized by the Aztecs and capitalized on by the Spanish, contextualizing the Latinx experience.
Craft is a way of making that honors the ethos of my practice. It is a connection to my past, to processes passed on to live through.
Selected works
“Casta Charts I,” 2021, canvas, casta charts, family photos, and complexion-matched oil paint, 26 in. x 34.5 in. Photo courtesy of the artist.
“(mis)Taken (detail),” 2025. Photo courtesy of the artist.
“(mis)Taken,” 2025, cochineal-dyed muslin, iron ink sourced from metal scraps in Arizona, screenprinted archival border maps: boundary between the United States and Mexico: agreed upon by the Joint Commission under the Treaty of December 30, 1853, 3 ft. x 135 ft. Photo credit: Emily Dormier.
“Fragments II,” 2022, scraps of cochineal-dyed canvas and paper, 31 in. x 11.75 in. Photo courtesy of the artist.
“flirt,” 2023–present, silk nightgown, cochineal dye, artist’s pheromones and sweat as modifier, 33 in. x 20 in. Photo courtesy of the artist.
“attraction; absorption; accumulation I & II,” 2024, acorn-mordanted-genus-rubia dyed TC2 weaving, personal spectral-domain optical coherence tomography, 28 in. x 38 in. (I); 36 in. x 38 in. (II). Photo courtesy of the artist.
“i know me by what isn’t, (thymus),” 2025, sequoia inked yupo, sequoia-dyed paper, sequoia and cochineal-dyed string, foraged sequoia wood, burls, pines, and charcoal, 20 in. x 9.5 in. x .75 in. Photo courtesy of the artist.
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