I began collecting documents and envelopes out of a need to investigate and report to United States Citizenship and Immigration Services about my entry into the country in order to qualify for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. They became the primary substrate of my practice, which includes painting, print, and collage. The precarious legality of existing between having or lacking a status permeates and informs my practice.

Painted envelopes are configured into intimate portraits of the only home I have made for myself, which has moved across the country and been mourned for with the imminent threat of DACA’s repeal. The plant paintings are physical and metaphorical maps of personal and official correspondence: the rubber plant abandoned outside the University of Iowa’s art studios, painted on the mailer envelope of my graduate degree; the split-leaf Monstera gifted to my husband and me for our wedding ceremony; the jade plant given to me by the only other DACAmented professor I’ve met. They are hyperrealist depictions that foreground community relationships while simultaneously obscuring information deemed pertinent by the government.