In my paintings I honor the landscape as both itself and a metaphor. Moun-tains become places of ascension, inwardness, and grace. Historically, in both spirituality and mythology, mountain imagery is seen as dark terrain, feral, deserted, holy, and stripped of self. Untamed and wild landscape, in all its apathy, elicits a primal pull to enter it, to be joined with it, and to know it intimately. Seeking the solace of empty places, I create intensely personal portraits of quiet, meditative spaces that encourage contemplation and investigation of self, sublimity, and the divine.

 In my studio practice, I engage in mystical contemplation; each artwork is a gateway to unseen realms and unexpected encounters. Painting transcends regular perception, offering a path toward understanding that goes beyond the intellect. I paint in silence, attuned to the whispers in my heart and the fleeting visions in my mind’s eye. Inspiration is unpredictable and often perplexing. Every brushstroke and form is an embrace of uncertainty. I view the artistic experience as mystical, visceral, and immediate.

 My paintings explore formal relationships through recurring geometric forms bound to a system of constraints. The reappearance of the same geometric forms across the body of work allows them to become familiar to the viewer, but their endless material manifestations and relationships mean constant reconsideration.

 The process of painting allows me to feel the discomfort of corporeal (dis)-embodiment. Indexing conversations that I have with my body into the painting is a way for me to understand my body and create an experience of what I feel when language fails. My approach to painting becomes a mediation with the canvas as I discover and give shape to the physical experiences of my skin: how it feels when my skin folds into itself, bodily urges, and the soft texture of my fatty tissue. I embody the duality of beauty and the grotesque.

 Through an intricate painting process with a maximalist tendency, my work transfers energy into images, which awakens the potential of perception hidden in the mind’s depths. It reflects my relationship to common human experiences related to spirit, unconsciousness, and fear.

 As a non-binary, first-generation Mexican American artist, I am heavily influenced by my lived experiences, cultural upbringing, and the Chicago queer community. Growing up in a traditionally Catholic household, I repressed parts of my identity for the sake of appeasing my family and assuring my survival. As an adult, I have found sisterhood within the queer community. My work is now a place where I can be boldly colorful and loud.

 In my work I employ pictorial space as a threshold to explore the emotional resonance of liminality, memory, grief, and the interior within constructed space. As a silent character, I dissolve into the transformative armature of painting and drawing, navigating the vulnerable questions of loss without the requirement of a clear answer.

 My artistic focus is on the theme of relationships, both in form and concept. In terms of form, my paintings embody a balance between reality and abstractness, achieved through exaggerated color, flattened space, and defined edges that allude to the artwork as an entity. From a conceptual standpoint, I find inspiration in my environment, using it as a reflection of the inner self.

 Painting is my language and most authentic mode of communication. I have an ever-growing body of smaller work on an assortment of wood species. My mixed-media paintings are floral-vegetal-biological-mineral-synthetic efflorescence: the play of nature and artifice.

 Raised Korean in China, and currently living in the American Midwest, my practice has been deeply influenced by diasporic memories. I explore ambiguities inherent in what is often taken for granted as an externally focused sense of possibilities, lack of common sense, and confrontation with the heavy, naked face of another, primarily in the realm of painting.