My work, like my self-identification, has many hyphens, associations and colors. As a queer Japanese-Mexican-American feminist, I pull from a variety of lexicons. I work from a wide scope of materials: a zen pursuit of mental calm through presence and acceptance, a Catholic ritualistic honoring of violence and death, a queer ethos of challenging meaning and a feminist inquiry of bodies and binaries. My work is a synthesis of lived experiences, stories people tell me, cultural iconography and social theories. The fragmented images reflect the disjointed experience of being a hybrid person constantly navigating multiple realities. This hybridity requires a constant translation of images, words and concepts into multiple “languages”. I am often witness to contradictions, mistranslations, illegibility and shifting meanings. These are embodied in the way I break apart an image through multiple frames. The space between what is real, surreal, hyper-real, imaginary, socially real and personally real start to cave into each other and overlap like the pieces themselves. Narratives around women, queerness, maternity, sex and desire are a constant undertone as I try to untangle what it means to be a human and manifests as underlying threads in my work.

 

I work with images as though they are parts of a quilt, binding together multiple frames to (re)create phenomenons. The pieces with clearly disjointed frames ask the viewer to question the constructed nature of pieces they may have initially read as whole. The act of photographing these objects allows me to transform them into metaphors, memories, triggers, trophies, and questions. I use found objects to recontextualize and synthesize the symbols that already exist in this world, at once in a tangible sense and as mental objects existing in the psychological and ephemeral world. This play between material reality and intangible affect allows me to honor things that exist in liminal spaces outside of language - things constantly shifting, transforming, fleeting, but real nonetheless.

 

The work invoke a Japanese aesthetic: simple, clean and organized, with a dash of calculated off-­kilteredness. The construction of multiple frames follows the performance of shooting and sight, as each frame becomes a glance that can only be held briefly before it must be let go in order to continue seeing. I am drawn to using multiple images to embody shifting experiences, mental slippages and our inability to fully hold onto a moment. The images encourage sensitization to slight shifts in color, thoughts and experiences. I use color as a tool to sew together images, relying on the subconscious reading of color to create a particular atmosphere within each work. The works deal with thematic elements of interruption, dualities, cycles, beauty and violence. The pieces function as a site for contemplation, using photographs of personal material and found objects as a conduit for experiences lived by the audience. The constructions assembled with these fragments invite the viewer to build a narrative from their own sense of truth.