In my current studio work, I study and explore the grid, patterning, and repetition. Coming from a design background, I pursue these experimental investigations in the form of drawings, sketches, and weavings. Half of my practice has been devoted to quilt, rug, and floor drawings. These pieces are meant to comment on the representation of the actual objects they mimic, as well as provide a new context through variations in space and medium. In the other half of my practice I use a preexisting grid structure— snow fencing—as a foundation for basic weaving methods.

My work reinterprets the accoutrements surrounding highschool football in New Orleans. The pomp and circumstance encircling the field opens a larger discussion about affiliation, and our collective reckoning with arbitrary markers of identity, be it race or nationality, or whether we were born into a family of Saints fans or followers of Jesus. I create simulations of the objects of commemoration and celebration on the field: DIY T-shirts celebrating one’s son on the team, or the handsewn marching-band banners or dance-team uniforms. I embellish

Heavily influenced by a dense and rich art form of storytelling in West Africa, my creative practice borrows from a pool of uniquely coded text and visually based languages from Ghana. In an exploration of relationships between my past experiences in Africa and my present residence in the United States, I am drawn to themes that define the then and the now, differences and similarities, and the image and the self. My practice analyzes the relationships between the semiotics and historicity of these themes, as a grappling coalescence of a postcolonial upbringing

Taking to the water is a deeply substantial part of our collective histories and modern existence.

Nothing that has once come into existence will have passed away and all the earlier phases of development continue to exist alongside the latest one.
–Sigmund Freud

The “me” you see today is an overlapping of the “me” who grew up in São Paulo, the “me” who now calls Florida home, the “me” who left for Xi’An after graduation, and the “me” who came back to the United States because life in China became too comfortable.

My works are attempts to make sense of the world that I (we) live in, by exploring the dissonance between false binaries and dualities that is prevalent in ideologies both throughout history and in the immediate present. Questions that I find myself drawn to include perversion and innocence, the wielding of power, the dynamics of gender and of good and evil. Much of the imagery I use in my work is a nod toward animé/manga, video games, art history, and mythology, distorted into reimagined narratives.

If life is a vast broth of entangled actions, making art is how I chart my way through the soup. Having been removed from my homeland of Mexico at a young age, I became accustomed to localizing my identity at the crossroads of memory, fact, and fiction. My work draws from personal histories of migration and adaptation. I consider my work meditative in that it strives to dissect and understand the components of my experience and my cultural and aesthetic legacy in a way that might give a greater understanding of the whole. While I use symbols, architectures,

Mitsuko Brooks’s work is in the style and practice of bricolage, a construction or creation from a diverse range of available things. Brooks collages with discarded artifacts and trash to create portals into her recent past: encapsulating the passage of time and an ability to access that experience through the use of nostalgia.

I am a New York–based artist working in multiple media. My work conceptually deconstructs and subverts the conventions of historically male-centric art. As a female artist, I integrate my perspective and experience through a mixture of domestic craft and art-historical references. By reimagining traditional painting constructs, I challenge notions of technique, perspective, space, dimensionality, and abstraction.