Tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do.
I am a bisexual, Puerto Rican, artist, writer, and educator from a lower-class upbringing. I just moved to Philadelphia from my hometown, Hartford, CT. I think what I do is dedicate my life to intentional deep-looking and feeling. I try to share that perspective with everyone who approaches me in good faith. Thus far I’ve presented a handful of solo and duo shows in North America. I try to make each show rigorously adherent to a multilayered theme which I usually never disclose directly to the public. For example, my show Poles at D.D.D.D. was a reflection on my father’s incontinence and how that opened an obvious wound for us within our culture that associates any indication of bodily flaw or need for care as potentially emasculating. It’s like that “be a man” meme which points to the cultural expectation that men should silently endure anything—pain, inconvenience, absurd tasks—without complaint to not risk being seen as gay or feminine.

I believe it is necessary to develop a speculative methodology as a means of resisting the process of interpellation maintained by dominant ideology. Through augmentation of the readymade (a signifier of class relations) with personal fictions, it is possible to suspend a claim to understanding rather than reinforce it. My practice involves an intuitively-driven approach to objecthood which estranges the power structure between interpreter and sign, often deconstructing “low class” material to contend with latent trauma and toxicity. But this is all done in an extremely occulted way, some people call this approach ‘lateral thinking’.

Are there any influences that are core to your work?
Aliens and cavemen.

My parents are Pentecostal. Speaking in tongues and being possessed by the Holy Spirit kind of people. Part of the Pentecostal teachings is that every person is ordained with a ‘don’, a gift from God that is the person’s teleological reasoning to exist. So since I could remember my parents have told me I am an “Artist” and that’s what I was “put on this earth” to do. I always identified as an atheist until maybe the last two years. Now I’m more of a quantum woo – messiah curious person. Matthew 5:3-12 is something I keep reading over and over again lately.

In 2006, I bought the game ‘Marc Ecko’s Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure’ thinking it was just another GTA type of game. It turned out to be a literal how-to guide for learning graffiti and I became a writer by virtue of falling in love with the game, then with the subculture and forms of graffiti, and then finally with the gamut of psychological dispositions, technologies and ideologies related to graffiti. Like, you have to realize, graffiti was discovered as a set of practices that have very specific unwritten rules, styles, terminology, and politics all spawning in a matter of a couple years in the late 60s and early 70s by a bunch of dispossessed and autonomous teenagers and pre-teens in Philadelphia and New York City.

Kanye West taught me that an artist is multi-faceted and translates their vision from one medium to the next.

There’s plenty more but I digress.

How were you introduced to the mediums that you work with?
Through the will of my mother. I don’t know, it’s hard for me to delineate when I am “making” and when I am just living. It’s too hard of a question for me to answer, haha. I was born and got “introduced to the mediums.”

Is there a moment you look back on as being formative to the work you do?
The day I met Ryan Wolfe and Hirokazu Fukawa at the Hartford Art School Sculpture Department sometime in 2013.

What’s your studio or workspace like? Do you have any rituals when you settle in there?
My studio has always changed. Sometimes it’s been my bedroom, sometimes it’s just my sketchbook, or a table, or Google docs. Right now it’s a room in my apartment in which I am storing and making art for three upcoming shows at Neue Welt in Nashville, Tennessee; KAJE in Gowanus, Brooklyn; and Queensway Television in Singapore.

My studio is a safe space for me to unearth the bare expressiveness of my own consciousness, will and body. I have no rituals in terms of what happens in my studio outside of the fact that I do any and everything in there, including: having sex, watching the news, contemplating reality, smoking weed, eating, crying intensely and making things that I end up exhibiting. I like to think of it as a room in which any and all processes are explored with a heightened awareness.

I try to not kill any critters that may enter it. I try to actually practice safety and selfcare in it too. If I leave dirty dishes, that can become a problem cause then I’ll start aestheticizing the mess and composing it. My studio has complete compositional potential. Sometimes it feels like that movie Synecdoche, New York (R.I.P. Philip Seymour Hoffman).

When needed, where do you look for inspiration?
I listen to ambient music, usually Silent Hill inspired ambient music YouTube, or Aphex Twin’s #19 on repeat. Or I listen to hip-hop or RnB. My secret sauce is videos of people doing RnB and Gospel song covers. A lot of those move me to tears. I regularly watch lectures by Dr. Michael Levin on his lab’s research on bioelectric gradient morphogenesis via ion channel modulation. I also watch lectures and read scientific papers on consciousness, UAPs, quantum mechanics and esoteric knowledge. Friends are the most inspirational, and my partner. Throughout my life I’ve had a hard time navigating deep set predilections towards pessimism, so my desire to not let my loved ones down has kept me going.

Have/how have these sources changed over time?
I’ve had music since Windows 95. The quantum stuff has had a greater prevalence in my life since my friend, three family members, and my dog passed away around the same time. I started asking google questions like: “How long does the brain retain new information and create memories after passing away?” “can my dead dog still hear me?”

Do you have a typical process for conceptualizing a new work?
Sometimes I think of work and make it exactly as I thought it, other times it’s a more time-disjointed collaging of elements that coalesce at some point as finished. Usually every sculpture I’ve made began as an image description in a google doc or a pen sketch. If I’m working on a solo project with numerous artworks, usually each artwork earns its place in the show by offering something novel to the project.

How do you form a relationship to an object?
In my solo exhibition bb at Hunt Gallery in Toronto, I made a wall artwork that included strands of my partner’s hair I collected one-by-one in my home in between the times she would visit me after being away for months at a time. In my solo show Poles at D.D.D.D. I used water bottles that my father carried around with him if he needed to urinate since he’s now suffering from incontinence and combined that with a large cigar box-turned-rejected-dog-casket. I don’t try to form relationships with objects, I have relationships with people and I can evoke those relationships through evidence of life. Sometimes that evidence is objects, sometimes it’s an experience. I try to turn each work I make into a diary entry. I want people to understand who I am through my art.     

How do you see your work evolving in parallel to things that are going on around you right now?
I’m not sure. I have deadlines I will meet but I’ve also been thinking a considerable amount about where we are heading as a country. We all need to seriously think about all the ways America has and is treating other countries and how seemingly everyone in power has been replaced by specifically unqualified people with a predilection towards domination. Tech bros own lawfare, media, all data and the police/drones. The government is now openly breaking its own laws and flagrantly displaying exactly how corrupt it always was. Our life force will be their monopolies unless real changes come into action as soon as possible. Plans for safety and support are imperative. If or once they take care of all, if not most, of the defiants, the youth could be conditioned in whatever manner the monopoly desires. These are eschotological times for these people and they are acting accordingly. The earth keeps heating up, the bees are having microplastics induced dementia. What I constitute as my “work” is always going to change but right now I feel like it is the most precarious it’s ever been. A couple years ago I had a vision of what my future would hold. Now I’m not sure what any of our futures hold. I’ve been having projections of what it might hold and it’s all stuff I shouldn’t disclose in a public interview.

What role does your environment or your surroundings play in your work?
I wake up and I am in this world. We are as much the environment as within it.

My show at SculptureCenter answers this question pretty succinctly since it dealt directly with my hometown and its ties to the legacy of arms manufacturing. I made this large pile of acorns and hundreds of wooden carvings based on the original wooden revolver models carved by Sam Colt in the 1800s. The pile looked like it fell out of a wall that was opened by an electrician and perhaps that a squirrel put it all there? Sometimes all I have is dark humor to deal with this devastating world.

How do you manage tending to the variety of responsibilities in the work you do? How do you mitigate burnout or exhaustion?
I take a lot of breaks and I also go so fucking hard. Sometimes I don’t make artwork for months and others I am making it 24/7. All my decompression habits are all still forms of study too so I feel like my burnout barometer is jacked up. For me art can have a bleak side to it in which it exposes how the entire fabric of reality (except maybe for mortality and the feeling of love) is a fallible contrivance. I don’t concern myself with making money through my art so if I need a break I take it, and I’m frugal by default. I have mostly said Yes cause I want to be out there talking to folks and picking brains. Part of this question too has to do with how much you want something and what are your values? I have an incessant drive to make and share art but in all honesty I need rest. Art is not inherently ethical or a “good” force in the world, it’s a fundamentally insightful and powerful force. Taking care is most important. Especially when it doesn’t necessarily prove to be an economically fruitful endeavour. 

What is a challenge you and/or other artists face and how do you see it developing?
Drinking the sweet poison of subjectivity. Well I’m sort of skeptical of the notion that “art” exists in all cultures. Art is the historical result of the denial of beauty in the world and so it feels uniquely western. Everything should be beautiful but it’s too damn hard while living in these conditions. Water and food should be free. It literally comes out of the ground. Healthcare should be free, well at least it would be if we all cared for each other’s well being. What all working class artists have in common is that their artistic integrity is intrinsically entangled with Capital. I have nothing to say nor do I concern myself with thinking about what I have in common with artists who are wealthy or come from wealthy backgrounds. I have no clue about how this issue is developing except that art schools seem to increasingly not be teaching art but rather other things that require similar skills but different values.

What do you collect?
Personal and historical memories. Tactics. Contact lists. I used to save lots of cursed/microwaved/cooked/deepfried memes before AI slop came and made all the cats and dogs do that terrifying dance.

Interviewed by Luca Lotruglio.