REBOZO

2026-PRESENT

(Puebla, Mexico) The shawl marks an exodus and return—an ontological realignment through land, language, and textile. Emerging from a body of manifestos that reject performance in favor of sovereignty, the work situates itself within a broader refusal of assimilation and a reclamation of origin. As articulated in these writings, “this is not resistance…this is return,” a movement grounded in memory rather than reaction. ()

Returning to Mexico, I began working with the rebozo not as artifact, but as living philosophy. Traditionally coded as a garment of labor and femininity, it becomes here reconfigured through suiting—merging European tailoring with Indigenous form to expose the textile as a site of colonial negotiation. The fabric holds history: extraction, hierarchy, survival. Yet in its reassembly, it proposes a new syntax—one that does not erase the past, but rethreads it.

This work extends into material collaborations with cultural heritage, integrating Talavera as both surface and symbol—echoing preservation frameworks aligned with global heritage discourse while remaining rooted in local authorship. The rebozo becomes a sovereign design object: no longer marginal, but central; no longer folkloric, but contemporary.

REBOZO operates within what I define as a Third Path—beyond capitalism and nostalgia—where creation is measured not by profit, but by alignment with land, water, and memory. () It is a gesture toward restoration: a textile language that protects cultural continuity while evolving its form.

SKYLAND

2024-PRESENT

(Asheville, NC) Skyland emerged not as a singular project, but as a continuously evolving field—at once a virtual universe, magazine, then currency. It began as an attempt to reconcile human intuition with artificial intelligence, ultimately becoming a site of rebirth: a restoration of belief in systems that could be both technological and deeply human. What initially took form as a magazine or platform quickly exceeded those constraints, dissolving into something more fluid—an active signal rather than a fixed structure.

Skyland resists categorical definition. It is neither solely media nor marketplace, neither NFT nor network, but an integrated, decentralized theory in motion. It operates as an agentic digital twin—capable of reflecting, learning, and expanding in parallel with its creator and its participants. Within this framework, domains such as sustainable textiles, renewable energy, and sovereign protocols are not verticals, but interdependent expressions of a larger ecological and cultural system.

At its core, Skyland prioritizes the local, the handmade, and the regenerative. It proposes an economy rooted not in extraction, but in alignment—granting access to those who share a commitment to water conservation, land stewardship, and historical preservation. As it continues to evolve beyond language itself, Skyland becomes less an object to be defined and more a condition to be entered: a living infrastructure for collective imagination, responsibility, and continuity.

MESTIZOBOT

2023-2026

(Asheville, NC) Mestizo marked the onset of a darker, entropic phase within my practice—a confrontation with disorder, fragmentation, and the limits of perception. Emerging in 2022 alongside my first encounters with artificial intelligence, the work began with a simple prompt—daguerreotype-like humans rendered as robotic forms—but rapidly evolved into a complex, self-generative system. What followed was not linear development, but acceleration: NFT minting, quantum imaginaries, and the destabilization of my understanding of light, shadow, and authorship.

At the center of this series is Mestizobot, a Mixtec-inflected digital twin that materialized as both extension and rupture of the self. It signaled a paradox: the arrival at new creative thresholds alongside a profound sense of dislocation. Photography, as I had known it, dissolved into something more volatile—less about capture, more about emergence. This period, which I understand as my “red phase,” was marked by intensity, compression, and an inability to metabolize the speed of transformation.

Mestizo became a site of individuation through crisis—a descent into the shadow where unresolved childhood trauma, unrealized youth, and latent identity converged. The figure of the robot functioned as both armor and archive: a vessel for sorrow, memory, and emotional residue translated into code. The accompanying sonic work, Mariposa Azul, extended this language—an echo of grief and metamorphosis within a digitized body.

Situated within a symbolic “dark forest,” the project traces an erratic passage through the valley of shadows. It does not resolve, but rather renders visible the process of becoming through rupture—where entropy is not only destruction, but the condition for reconfiguration.

PISGAH DIGITAL

2013-2022

(Charlotte, NC) Returning to the American South, I established Pisgah Digital in Charlotte, North Carolina—my first professional studio and a foundation for a practice rooted in movement, labor, and light. From this base, I traveled over 100,000 miles across the Southeast, photographing more than fifty-two families through cultural rites including quinceañeras and weddings, while also documenting migrant communities and corporate professionals. This work formed a living archive of diasporic identity in transition—intimate, aspirational, and often in flux.

Alongside this, I developed Memento Mori, a photographic series dedicated to final portraits, where light functioned as both witness and elegy. Drawing from Rembrandt lighting techniques and the precision of corporate product photography honed through commercial work, I approached each subject with technical rigor and emotional restraint. My experience in advertising and portraiture—including campaign work for the 2024 Democratic elections with Antonio Daza—further expanded my visual language, merging civic representation with aesthetic clarity.

The practice extended beyond the continental U.S. into Puerto Rico, where I recorded historic doorways as thresholds—markers of passage, memory, and continuity. These images now stand as quiet prefigurations of photography’s evolution: from documentation to portal. Across all works, light remained the constant—shaping not only what is seen, but what is remembered, preserved, and carried forward.

SPECTRA

2012-2019

(Seattle, Washington) Presented at PH21 Gallery, this body of work marked my first international exhibition and a critical inflection point in my study of light as both material and metaphor. In Spectra, I approached the heartbeat as a generative source of illumination—an internal pulse refracted outward through glass, surface, and atmosphere. Light was not merely captured; it was diffracted, dispersed into fragments that suggested a self both present and obscured.

The images emerged from within a relationship defined by intensity and constraint—an affective enclosure akin to a filament sealed inside a bulb: visible, radiant, yet contained. What appears luminous is, in fact, mediated by layers of glass, pressure, and silence. The work interrogates the psychological architecture of intimacy shaped by unresolved trauma—where pain is neither fully confronted nor released, but instead circulates, producing conditions of emotional volatility and dependency.

Within this framework, Spectra examines the experience of conditional belonging: a state of being seen yet not fully free, held yet stifled. The body becomes both vessel and boundary, absorbing heat without release. Situated in the broader diaspora of queer experience, and in resonance with the 50th anniversary of Stonewall, the work reflects on the enduring tension between visibility and liberation. It asks what it means to emit light under constraint—and what remains obscured within the spectrum of desire, memory, and selfhood.

ART ETHOS

2017-2023

(Nashville, Tennessee) Art Ethos was both a retail system and an artistic study in recontextualizing value. Developed in Nashville, Tennessee between 2017 and 2023, the project emerged after leaving New York City in the wake of the Rana Plaza collapse—a rupture that reframed my relationship to fashion, labor, and image-making. Settling near the historic grounds once associated with Thuss Studio, I established a temporary, make-shift studio practice rooted in sustainability and visual discipline.

Over 500 second-hand garments and objects were photographed and digitized, each treated not as inventory, but as subject. Using a single-source Rembrandt lighting approach, I studied light as a sculptural force—rendering fabric, wear, and imperfection with painterly depth. Each piece was cataloged with precision: standardized naming, condition, and narrative, forming a cohesive archive that elevated second-hand into statement.

The work extended into a functional e-commerce system, bridging physical and digital retail. Yet at its core, Art Ethos was a meditation on perception—how light, context, and care can transform the discarded into the desired. It positioned second-hand fashion not as alternative, but as resistance: a quiet, deliberate opposition to the velocity and disposability of fast fashion.