Artist Statement

My work addresses playful and painful exchanges between Puerto Rico and the United States. I am interested in examining how colonial subordination is extended through globalization as communities have shifted gears from a production-based society to one that is grounded in consumption. My work often organizes popular, religious, and consumer iconography into fluctuating new hierarchies to describe the hybridity of contemporary belief systems.

Artist Statement

T/here represents my multiple modes of existence/being and my constant shifting of the concept of home. The images deal with the fracturing of home space that occurs in the Diasporic body. Home, not as a geographical space but as one of shifting memory/memories, where the dynamics between the private/public, the interior/exterior, and the familiar/foreign are ones of negotiation and compromise. In this scenario my body becomes a site for this flux-and-flow experience, which finds the home space somewhere in between.

Artist Statement

I am focused primarily on two things, multiplicity of perspective (the many at once) and the elasticity of time . . . which stretches and bounces back and forth in our complex, collective human psyche. History dissolves, evaporates, and reconstitutes constantly and all at once, making the postcolonial predicament immediate and ephemeral, distant and perpetual. The shift space, the ooze, the place in between, is where meaning is elucidated and compounded all at once.

Artist Statement

Over the past decade, I have been working on a body of work that evokes memory, loss, and cross-cultural ties. The work as a group, through object and thought, embodies power and history. Through their formal rigor and the poetic associations that the recycled elements trigger, the sculptures narrate stories of personal identity, family, spiritual and physical journeys, erotic tensions, and nostalgia for home.

Artist Statement

My practice at the present time aims to engage the viewer on a multi-sensory platform in an almost theatrical mise en scène. Using sound as the unifying tangent plane that binds together my multidimensional practice, I create layered works that investigate race and identity via popular cultural icons.

Artist Statement

The notion of movement, with which the work plays, offers a reading of the historic relationship between nature and artifice. It’s for this reason that it is not the object that becomes the work, but rather its representation, the photograph as a symbol of the documentation, which offers itself to the spectator as testimony of the utopia that in the end lives only as image, in the process of disappearing.

Artist Statement

The relationship between personality and space has always fueled my work. What factors have tied us to an identity? What choices have we been able to make in creating this aesthetic? I explore my own questions of identity, its influences and its limitations within a Caribbean society.

Artist Statement

Working from memory and historical narratives has been a way to question my “collective memory,” to summon the constituent elements of the Caribbean identity. I have tried to make that confused past become visible; I have placed objects together and created a world of odds and ends. That is the very characteristic of the Caribbean: building up on a field of ruins, fertilizing a field of corpses, patching things up, making treasure of nothing.

Artist Statement

One of the things we are looking at is the development and use of the term “landscape” and “landmark”—how these terms are related and how they differ. The term landscape has a long history within the arts—music, literature, the visual arts, and architecture. With landscape, as Vito Acconci has aptly described it, the “land escapes”—it’s that portion of a territory that the eye can comprehend in a single view.

Artist Statement

A Cuban reality expanded in time, extending: the Line, a symptom of Revolutionary Cuba. I see the line as an extension of desire of the person waiting to get the anticipated thing. The longer the waiting is, the bigger the projection of the desired object must appear in the person’s head; otherwise it would be very easy to lose patience.

Artist Statement

Francis Bacon is quoted as saying “The job of the artist is to deepen the mystery.” In this and my other works, through the use of conspicuous invisibility and the transparency of shared associations, the mystery remains elusive. My works may be viewed as a desire to reconstruct and defy fixed identity in my artistic practice, to be “present” and to be “invisible” by choice and by circumstance.

Artist Statement

My special interest is urbanism—life in, around, and within city structures. . . . My work with the architectonic spaces has gone through several phases. I have tried to activate dead zones of the city. In other works, I have created transportable cities with social implications. More recently I have worked with closed-circuit cameras that are used in surveillance programs.

Artist Statement

I am investigating my voice and voicelessness simultaneously. . . . I am very wary of narrative as it often feels like an imposition on experience, a rationalization that inhibits as much as it offers consolation or promises order or meaning. Over time, I have begun to understand or accept that the conceptual process itself became the actual work. I began to call it my “cultural autopsy.”

Artist Statement

I think that it is very important to keep the culture alive through art by using symbols, signs, objects that have been used by the Maroon populations. For example, the Afaka sign has been used to protect the spoons that symbolize the Maroon community while also transforming the object into art.

Artist Statement

In a place where people cannot afford to create their identity through consumerism and conspicuous consumption, they must create identity from the inside out—suffering, rejoicing, working hard to survive, and living a real life. I believe this is why Jamaicans are so proud, unique, and fearless. This is why they are the inspiration for everything I do. My homeland is integral to my work. I retell these captured stories, exaggerating the most potent moments using repetition or playing with motion.

Artist Statement

Bringing the illegal trips toward Puerto Rico in El Canal de la Mona together with the Dominican habit of stopping for certain activities in los paradores along the freeways, D’La Mona Plaza is a project that tries, through absurdity, to denounce these tragedies.

Artist Statement

Childhood is the time when we start to build up our personality, and it is supposed to be the happiest time of our lives, but social violence makes it difficult to adjust. In order to be strong, children make masks where they can hide fear, so they can play with the negative idea they have of themselves. These masks shield the feelings reflected in society as I show in Mambrú, with its child soldiers who have been taken away and used as instruments of destruction.

Artist Statement

In recent years, possible bodily mutations have inevitably become the main focus of my work. This allows me to experiment with new ways of merging elements of urban life, gender stereotypes, and stress with nature, spirituality, and instinct. In other words, through this sort of visual laboratory I can take a closer look at our postmodern world, and I can take to its utmost limits that most amazing human trait of adaptability.

Artist Statement

My art is oriented first to my fellow Dominicans, so we recognize and accept ourselves as we are: the wonderful complex mixture of several civilizations with their shades of color reflected in the complexity of our skin and culture. By making images of black and mulatto subjects the basis of my work, I challenge the aesthetic Greco-Latin codes on which we pretend to base the concept of Dominican beauty.

Artist Statement

My work is an existential analysis of our contemporary Caribbean societies—societies that are still afraid to free themselves from the burden created in the past. It’s about the material fiction that coexists with the spiritual reality. We are experiencing a transitory existence in our transitory societies that gives birth to my transitory works.