Artist Statement
I combine photography and painting to create abstract works that explore the relationships between humans, natural landscapes, and the artificial environments that we inhabit to tell stories about the Latin diaspora. These compositions aim to appear almost otherworldly, straddling the boundary between memory and imagination, the natural and the invented. They range in scale and presentation, from postcard sized pieces arranged into finely organized grid typologies up to monumental prints, and arise from complex processes of construction.
Mountains, rock formations, and other geological features appear as recurrent motifs in my work, serving as a source of orientation and a scaffold for memory. They are immense facts, undeniable in their physical and temporal stature. As an example, my recent Paisajes Plasticos series focuses on the Andean Cordillera, which I first saw as a child when I accompanied my father on his return to Chile after the return to democracy in 1989. The Andes are always visible there, towering majestically above the landscape, a witness to a treasure trove of family stories, the tangled history of the dictatorship, and the accelerating impacts of climate change and environmental destruction. In Paisajes Plásticos they appear simultaneously as glorious and melancholy, timeless but under threat.
My work generally combines techniques from both photography and painting, natural and constructed environments, and personal stories. In Glass-scapes I employ a complex process to photograph and manipulate the loosely painted backgrounds seen in museum dioramas (where I first experienced nature as a NYC resident), transforming them into mysterious glimpses of landscapes. Their pictorial language includes a dark penumbra partially enclosing a lit center with the crosshairs of the focusing device still visible, asking viewers if the views they see are real or constructed ones. The Glass-Scapes conjure both lived and imagined experiences of nature, recalling memories of places and pictures seen, but not as we have inhabited or viewed them before. In Shards and Represas, I compose and photograph torn fragments of the old art history textbooks that I pored over as a child, creating environments that appear both natural and constructed.
Working on art- drawing- is to me trying to solve a problem that seems unsolvable. The mountains in my images witness events, they hide and seem to hold not just their own experiences but ours as well. They link both literally and metaphorically across space and time– they are always there. The majority of my father’s family were refugees from the Pinochet regime. Though I grew up in the United States, I heard through my family’s stories the echos of this government's complicity in what happened in Chile. My work attempts to reconcile these “immense facts:” using the privilege of the distance I’ve had and through an aesthetic exploration to bring a kind of synthesis to the viewer. We can’t necessarily resolve the tension but through the creative act, can acknowledge something happened here.