ARTIST STATEMENT

Navigating notions of motherland/ otherland, I search the abyss in between. With my creative practice I raise and re-envision ancestral aesthetics submerged by colonialism, lifting sovereign strategies as subversive maps to liberation. They inform my art and life praxis. 

Painting Vieques’ struggle for peace and justice, its bioluminescent waters revolutionized my vision and aesthetics; inspired me to paint our ancestors as light beings over black surfaces; and initiated my 2014 move from New York City to my ancestral homeland of Borikén, where I am still based. Embracing black as the original background and canvas (as in the womb and cosmos), I reclaim blackness and draw light from it. 

Through post-Hurricane-Ir-Ma-ría darkness displaying epic firefly and cucubano constellations, I conceived CucubaNación. Born from bioluminescence lessons of this archipelago, it envisions a conceptual nation of light. Fireflies alight in those dark nights prompted new portraits of Boricuas transcending colonialism, painted in the red, black, and yellow of lightning bugs, surrounded by their green glow—colors anchoring Puerto Rico within the greater global Black liberation struggle.  

In my Rematriating Borikén project, I channel Puerto Rico Trench deep-sea bioluminescence to paint Boricuas on the rematriation journey. These are folks like myself venturing here from the Diaspora, others returning after a long absence, and life-long stewards. Painting us in the abyss where sunlight doesn’t reach and oxygen is scarce, symbolizes our stewarding and reclaiming of ancestral lands that colonialism deems uninhabitable, unsustainable, while it hypocritically covets them, displaces us. Turning to our natural environment for liberatory light lessons reconnected me to the socially conscious black power/ black light aesthetics of my own birthplace. Brooklyn childhood memories evoke images of black velvet paintings: women with afros, black panthers and black lights aglow. My rematriation portraits recreate this aesthetic to reference the blackness of the abyss and the glow of our bioluminescence. 

Years of navigating darkness and bioluminescence emerged as transcendent medicine while recovering from an emergency eye surgery in 2020. Forced to adapt to a new way of seeing at the axis of colonialism/ power outages/ hurricanes/ earthquakes/ pandemic, my creative practice expands into a liberatory life praxis.