About me
I am a visual artist based on the international boundary between Tijuana, Baja California and San Diego, USA. My work focuses on the interplay between different ways of knowing and remembering our relationships with each other and with the land. I live in Tijuana, Baja California, on the banks of the Tijuana River, on the unceded lands of the Kumeyaay people. I grew up in rural Minnesota, alongside the Pomme de Terre River, a waterway on Oceti Sakowin ancestral lands and a natural boundary between this nation and the Anishinaabeg to the east and north. My German great-grandparents homesteaded there in the 1890s, thirty years after the US government drove out the Dakota people, repealed all existing treaties with them, and seized their lands along the Minnesota River. The stories we were told encouraged us to believe we were the first ones on this land. My life today in the shadow of the US-Mexico border wall reminds me daily of the violent subjection of people and the land that we know and we see, but that is easier to forget.
My work involves (re)storying, a process of unlearning and rediscovery of these places that we think we know. Forms like the map, the story, the photograph, the archive and my bodily presence in real geographical spaces give me new orientations that interrupt the sense-making project of settler colonialism and provoke questions about place, history and belonging. In my practice, I explore the ways spaces and places are produced—by political, economic and social forces that are often erased and made invisible to us.
I am currently an MFA Candidate in Art & Design at San Diego State University. I earned a master's degree in Literature and Cultural Studies from the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) and completed specialized studies in contemporary art and photography in the independent Program of Contemporary Photography (PFC) in Mexico, under the direction of the late Javier Ramírez Limón. I have exhibited my photographs and videos in Mexico and Latin America, the United States and Europe. I have lived inTijuana, Baja California, Mexico since 2011.
CV Click here for a downloadable copy of my CV