My Work
I am a visual artist based on the international boundary between Tijuana, Baja California and San Diego, USA. 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 1870s, and we always thought we were the first ones on this land. My life today in the shadow of the border wall dividing the US and Mexico makes me reflect on the relationship between my personal history and the ways I am implicated in the ongoing project of settler colonialism in North America: settler colonial logics have oriented me to forget the violent displacement of Indigenous people even as I see it before my eyes.
My work involves (re)storying, a process of unlearning and rediscovery of these places that we think we know. The map, the story, the photograph, the archive and our 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 show the ways spaces and places are produced—by political, economic and social forces that are often erased and made invisible by the aesthetic codes of landscape imagery.
Biography
I am currently a student in the MFA program 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 I later 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 live in Tijuana, Baja California, Mexico
