I’ve never seen my father in real life. I know him only through family stories, photos, and digital screens. Painting allows me to explore my lost family’s Salvadoran history in order to understand my own biracial identity. These histories include the subjects of war, the recurrence of mental illness, and loss.

Represented in these shelter sites is the human navigation of survival. The process is illustrated in both content and composition. When our modern world comes to an end, and the world-without-us continues, only our surreal consciousness is left to manufacture the dystopia. I use different textures in painting to emphasize an object’s meaning. Some works are rendered as still lifes, with juxtaposed impasto styles, while others integrate images from the Internet as a means of mirroring the chaotic variety of the world. Taken as a whole,

I tell stories about the past, and about how the beliefs and technologies that shape our realities change. These stories are small.

I met a woman who had just visited her childhood home in rural Australia. She was often alone when she was little. Sometimes, she and her brother would climb the 8-foot hedge surrounding their house, scaling the dark, dry interior branches and then floating on top. I would like to tell that story.

My work relates to the rapid state of change we see in the world at large—war, terrorism, refugees, displacement, identity, and collapsing economies.

The gym is a place where everyday antics—sexuality, competitiveness (within and between the sexes), ego, and primal behaviors—are amplified in a stagelike environment where there is a hyperawareness of bodies in a public space. Engaging the politics of looking through both male and female gazes, we sneak glimpses of others in mirrors and through makeshift windows in gym equipment.

When considering the omnipresence of screens, it is clear that screen time is as much an integrated part of life as a form of escape from it. We are required to maintain a split consciousness between screens and physical space. My recent paintings feature images of NFL broadcasts, which combine the unpredictability of live television with the emotional investment of sports fanaticism, perhaps the last stronghold of television as a real-time shared event or collective experience.

My work is a response to the surrounding landscape. From the beginning, I’ve been influenced, both knowingly and unknowingly, by its designs, color, and lines. What drives the work is my desire to create a sense of tension and space. Thinly layered color and geometric forms work to achieve this. As with a lingering memory, I am constantly reworking and reinterpreting what I see. A sense of history is always present.

My recent works are tied up in painterly romanticism, while trying to eschew all of it. Paint is substituted for charcoal and water. Space is relegated to the distance between me and the wall. Touch is limited to the smashing and scraping of dust. Figuration is used only for depicting stomachaches, energy drinks, and skepticism.

Since I continue to discover profound parts in each painting I make, I question if a painting can ever be complete. In positioning my work in the world, I accept past failures with the hope of success in the present and future. I read into my work by looking at it. I instinctively connect to feelings of intensity, tension, and contact. In my work, the physicality of the paint collides with the comfort of illusion.