My mixed-media narrative paintings colorfully encourage reflection on our relationship to inside and outside spaces. I am intrigued by the erosion of private and public spaces and how exploring our relationship to place in paint, and through spatial disorientation, can subvert normative ideas about gender, sexuality, and racialized subjects. Through painting “private” spaces and objects used/housed in domestic settings I challenge how women’s expertise is often confined to the “Four F’s”—food, fashion, family, and furnishings” to push our cultural attitudes for more expansive understandings. My visual and written work engage the themes of home and belonging, presence/absence, and what perpetually remains at the margins of societal focus; the evidence and social impact of femme labor inside and outside of home spaces. 

Because of my artistic focus on the domestic realm I purposefully use latex (house) paint in my compositions. I choose to integrate elements of fabric, sewing, embroidery, or cross-stitch in my paintings to meditatively honor the time intensive manual labor of decorative arts. I incorporate pattern as marks in my compositions to use the beauty of the mundane as narrative driver. Enthralled by larger scale paintings, I seek to invite the viewer to cross a threshold and be enveloped by the work. My background as an interdisciplinary feminist scholar means I inform my narrative paintings by spending time in archives and delving deeply into primary and secondary research about the subject matters I explore. This often results in writing and reflecting on the process and the content in concert with painting to present ideas beside and beyond language for new consciousness-raising opportunities.

Ultimately my work aims to make the invisible visible. I challenge hierarchical categories related to what is or is not considered to be fine art. By turning my focus on femininity through my paintings I take up space through their size or bold colors to complicate the politics of visibility. I draw on themes of Xicanx feminism, domesticity, intimacies, iconography, and historical erasures to teach viewers something new, while simultaneously providing visual pleasure. I paint, write, and stitch the worlds I want available to me. I map vulnerability through words and the visual to shape narrative landscapes for my and others’ expanded awareness.