Artworks

Hand-made paper made with fibers from a garden in CDMX, Casa Lu, black ink and blue pigment, rectangular wood box with metal key, 6.2 x 4 ins.

Papel hecho a mano con fibras del jardín en CDMX, Casa Lu, tinta negra y pigmento azul, caja rectangular de madera con llave de metal, 16 x 10 cm

Floating text, vegetable paper, 3.15 x 8.7 ins.
Texto flotante, papel vegetal, 8 x 22 cm

Glyph-inspired drawings created with soil and clay, painted double-sided in red and blue pigments on gallery glass walls. These marks represent ideas exchanged during dialogues with invited participants in the Guided Visits creative process.

Indoor gallery installation view

Outdoor gallery installation view

The traveling bookcase contains 12 open-ended short stories printed and folded on paper. The stories were inspired by conversations with 12 women from New York, Lisbon, Evora in Portugal, and Cordoba, Argentina. It is made of wood, fabric, and metal hardware.

C-print on photographic paper triptych, 17 x 22 ins. / 44 x 56 cm each, 56 x 26 ins / 1.42 x 66 cm framed

Guided Visits, abstract range composition, is a tryptic graphic of a map and pattern combining digital photographs and color fields. The images render a diagram of relations by associations between personal relationships, visiting places, and clothing. I requested a change of clothing for my relationships, friends, and family in the countries I call “home,” Argentina and the United States. I traveled back and forth from New York to Argentina and visited a place dedicated to each person dressed in the person’s clothing. Once at the location, I took a picture and a self-portrait of myself there. The photographs document a layer of significance within the woven net of associations pertinent to this perimeter of the image and following the variables of a “game” in the piece’s program or diagram. Abstracting and documenting a gesture that takes all these linkages in the form of an artifact, a frontal portrait, in a personal perspective.

Detail

Detail

Detail

Detail

Dark Room digital program

The large-scale audiovisual installation presents a continuous, smooth digital flow. This flow is generated through a modular software program, exploring the transformation of mundane numbers and significant memories into "digital alchemy” of a reconfigured digital experience.

Turning visual data into sound

The digital program Dark Room creates an audiovisual experience using various scripted variables to shape the coding and decoding of the visualization and musicalization output. The program sources digital material and videos as data inputs. An algorithm in the program uses the color values of the digital image to generate new digital material, which is displayed as a new color mapping and generates the piece's soundtrack. The audiovisual experience of Dark Room is a vibrational flow of color and sound that immerses the viewer in a realm of immersive re-imagination.

Turning memories associated with places into a digital archive

The digital archives used in this piece are video recordings from a participatory and performative artwork that is part of my ongoing project exploring the act of visiting people and places. The videos capture seemingly ordinary locations in Portugal, New York, and Argentina. The project participants chose these seemingly ordinary sites because they are unique and extraordinary places where they lived something meaningful.  During the visits, participants acted as guides, uncovering the significance of each site.  

As we visited the location guided by the participant, the notion of time was spilled open. With the simple gesture of the visit, we uncovered the meaning of a particular site, a sign that perhaps because that meaning might be most valuable in a person’s placemaking experience. In each location, we uncovered the meaning of a particular site and its value in a person's sense of placemaking experience. 

In the context of this project, we took the role of an urban archeologist-sociologist using tools like dialogue and memory storytelling. Through this process, we found and made appear a place unfolding in the mix of time. We were activating a constellation of human-made indicators, signs, and meanings stored within and resonant between ourselves.

I want to thank Dave Sanchez, a musician and expert programmer in Max/MSP/Jitter, for collaborating on the algorithm for Dark Room.

Projected animations (no audio)
En Lugar is a looped animated digital collage with text, extracts from transcripts of conversations from the Guided Visits series.