Artist Statement

My work examines the visible and invisible workings of daily life and the dynamics of history through projects with collaboration, experimentation, and research at their core. I draw on archives, allegory, empathy and absurdity to create work across media—including drawing, installation, photography, printmaking, video, and writing. My interest is in finding the poetics between materials and social issues, including migration, displacement, and the relationship between domestic life and natural disaster.

Growing up in diasporic Latin American and Jewish communities in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania at a time of its de-industrialization spurred my ongoing interest in the interplay of people and place. This experience led me to concentrate on how barriers form, ossify, and dissipate. I am interested in built and natural environments—how cities churn, how buildings and domestic objects can stand in for human relationships, and how various sites (e.g., Brutalist architecture, frozen lakebeds, seismic shake tables) speak to larger social and political structures.

Working in campaigns of projects, I telescope out from the details of specific circumstances and histories to address broader social and political structures. Collaboration is a hallmark of my work, with projects evolving out of correspondence and collaboration with family, friends, specialists, and members of the public. Experience in the social sciences, particularly anthropology and ethnography, informs how I incorporate multiple voices and perspectives in order to best represent an issue at hand. My projects manifest in forms such as engraved kitchen table tops that hang as paintings, or an artist book embedded into furniture. While my work moves across form, language and drawing are the spines of my practice.

 Over the last six years, I have realized these concerns and methods in Balas & Wax, my ongoing collaborative art practice with Fred Schmalz. We draw on shared and respective concerns (e.g., the strangeness of cities, political and personal histories, psychology of space) and skills (drawing, poetry; managing large-scale artistic productions, editing magazines). The drawings in our collective practice are my solo contribution, apart from which we holistically conceptualize and produce all other aspects of our multimedia projects. We collaborate not only with each other, but continually engage fellow artists, subject matter experts, and neighbors to suite the project at hand.