The terms gun and weapon are practically interchangeable. From hunting to war, self defense to target practice; the gun has been a symbol of power and destruction. Art and entertainment have both taken the same approach to he gun. Traveling Wild West shows had gunslingers that shot crude silhouettes and names, but this was done to illustrate the shooters prowess. Some artists have used high-speed film to capture a bullet slicing through its target, while other artists have melted guns into sculptures.

I paint on old floral bed sheets, which are worn and faded from years of dreaming and washing. I find comfort in the predictability and familiarity of the floral patterns, but I also see these patterns as visual representations of tired but unquestioned traditions. In my work, the floral patterns are disrupted, restructured, and buried by my own improvisational visual language. From conception to death, the surface of a bed is a place where one both experiences and escapes reality, a physical link between dreaming and waking life.

Each stitch is a piece of me that I give, a moment of my life and a unit of my love, meticulously culminated into a universal visual language. The optimist in me knits for the cause, while my formalist counterpart works to make the images that sell my thoughts.

I knit for the true lovers.

I make these objects as a practice and a confirmation of my optimism. I make these images to communicate and persuade as a serious contender while retaining my optimism by promising to never take myself too seriously.

I use drawing as a means of visual research and exploration. My works rely on an additive process and are built up slowly using forms inspired by both instinctive and carefully considered marks made on the picture surface as well as images derived from memories, literary references and pop-culture. I choose images that arrest my attention by sparking possible motifs. These ideas and images are stored away, allowing the concepts to ripen, and are later re-analyzed and worked into a drawing.

I am interested in depicting the moment when the corporeal and the spiritual/mental negotiate concession. Fusing memory, experience and imagination with visual story-lines stemming from pseudo-science, art history, science fiction, folklore, language and literature I compose plots and visual narrative paradoxes progressing from an initial idea or mark. Drawing seems an appropriate method to enact this sequence as it is a malleable way to convey information. It allows me to be historically inaccurate, to meld themes of the documented with the absurd and scatagorical.

"Hey, that's neat," followed by, "It looks fun to paint." I'd like to say otherwise, but that's how my paintings begin. Sometimes, if i'm lucky, I'll have a specific idea of where to take a work. But more often than not, I'll just draw and paint from a random personal photo and see where it goes. If there is any meaning to be had in my work, it is in the fact that at no time do I turn off the part of me that turned me on to the image in the first place. In other words, as I paint, hundreds of little "Hey, that's neat" moments occur within the painting.

My work uses as a starting point desert landscapes and conflicted spaces in which narratives involving violence, dysfunctional landscapes and communities commingle. There is an underlying violence: people are being chased down, something or someone is being smuggled, cars are crashing. The characters could be civilians, drug dealers, border patrols, border crossers, soldiers, or minutemen, but they are missing, leaving their cars and other objects to speak for them.

I strive for elegant simplicity while working figures into abstract environments. The figure and ground merge, resulting in a loss of certain edges, which is intended to create a sense of submission and solitude. The environment creates and becomes a part of the figure, and the figure fades into the surrounding space. The lack of defined facial features adds to the idea that the figures are not specific individuals, but rather representative of anonymous people.

My current work is based in painting, yet I incorporate installation and drawing to explore the landscape, vantage point, the human instinct to build, and our complex relationship to the land. Free of people, the paintings depict gestures of the built environment as both literal evidence and metaphor for human impact.

History is subjective, there are so many blurred lines and so much distortion. Context and point of view is very important, one person's hero is another person's villain...it depends on who tells the story. As a gay Mexican-American I have always felt excluded and under-represented by history. By working from old photographs and using history as a backbone for a lot of my work, I can reweave these "lessons" of the past.