ABOUT

The Immigration Series

My current series portrays tension. Tension between immigration and nationality, between trauma and mythos, and between conformity and cultural enunciation.

For this series, I revisited old photographs that capture my family’s displacement, repatriation, and resettlement. These photographs serve as snapshots into my family’s fragmented history, which each of us experienced and recollect differently. By illustrating these memories, I interrogate the distant relationships first-generation immigrants have with their half-generation “heirs”—a relationship informed by globalism and withering native tongues.

Almost ironically, diasporic communities’ attempts to conform places them in a liminal space that abounds in cultural ingenuity. The Immigration Series is only one artifact of this creativity. Upon digital re-creation, loss of identity is framed by removing parts of the body and bringing attention to atypical practices resulting from deliberate efforts to assimilate. The former self is splintered, giving way to an alien identity. Over time this identity becomes the authentic self forever stuck in a nostalgic past yet forced to press ahead toward a mandatory future.

Throughout my work,  I define the immigrant identity as an act of intentional assembly, understood and constructed by myself as the vessel for this inheritance. Assemblage is made possible with new applications of the digital age, from painting programs to internet archives, to instantaneous translations, which are both clumsy and necessary.

Education and Other Works

I graduated from the University of North Texas with a B.F.A in Studio Art and M.Ed. in Early Childhood Education.

My other work consists of portraiture, illustration, and oil abstractions. I invite you to engage this material and contact me with any questions or inspirations.