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Growing up as a Catholic Latina, I was very aware of the desirable attributes prescribed to women of my faith, including chastity. At the time, I did not dare to question them out loud. I adhered to them innocently, thinking that this was the way the world operated. In my practice, I photograph women in order to free myself from that conditioning. In Let It Go, I explore femininity collaboratively, working with close friends and acquaintances in a full, frank, and free way. In moody, narrative-driven compositions, we explore desire and desirability, and question the myriad expectations of women and how we are portrayed.

lips

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manos sofa

pantyhose

Pelos Espejo

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the eye the mirror

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the hand, the glove

Knotted

the touch

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I am the youngest sibling and only daughter in a household of Mexican immigrants. The dissonance between my desires and my culture’s expectations made me anxious. My father’s diagnosis of early on-set Alzheimers, and my family’s inability to have an open discussion about his condition, only made things worse. I turned to photography to express these inner inquietudes, impressionistically exploring events and anxieties. 

In my series, Fictitious Family, I have utilized my own family’s photo album.  I took those images into the color darkroom, placing them in the negative carrier. The results created a negative which expressed how my father’s disease inverted my family’s dynamics and familial relationships inside out and upside down.

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“The room is dark, but our eyes gradually adjust to the darkness.” After Dark -Haruki Murakami

My ongoing series Mood, Memory, or Myth is an exploration of the human experiences and memories of fear, anxiety, and pleasure, and the impact of growing up in a family that refuses to discuss any of that. Sex, sadness, death, and family illnesses are subjects that my family considers taboo. My family’s inability to discuss these subjects openly left me without a voice. I found that depicting these forbidden subjects empowers me, allowing me to explore my feminine desires, my sadnesses, and to come to terms with the expectations my family and my Mexican culture imposed on me as a female: to wed and have children. I create illusions that conjure the realms of the imagination without presenting a factual reality. Something very personal and complex, but which allows viewers to relate freely on their own terms. I use these subjects and memories to help me navigate the anxieties caused by my family’s expectations of me as a woman, and to fill the space left by my family’s silence on these taboos.

I work traditionally, shooting film, Polaroids, paper negatives, and making darkroom chromogenic prints, occasionally incorporating mixed media. Analog production allows me to insert more of myself into each print.

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 the eye, the distortion

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un ostion trailer. preselected for the madrid art film festival

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the hands, the kiss

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En un instante is a junction between two nerve cells where a gap between an impulse and my sx70 attempt to express of  my cinematic dreams. It is a world that may conflict with reality and life. Feelings, thoughts, and symbols, appear and I use them to make sense of the world that I dreamt about.

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I started with a single red dot then a smear and then the redness just continued from that point on… The women in these images symbolize the goddess of love and fertility. Love, and life alone are complex let alone fertility. Red is a color that recurs in my mixed media pieces. Red being a powerful and energetic  color draws attention to areas inside the photograph, and has a natural influence over us and our emotions. I use red to explore love, life, health, and power. 

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During my recent move, I rediscovered these images and started experimenting, using stitching and oil pastels. They became this project, “Oocitos Ovarios - Red, Blue and You.” 

The mixed media process has helped me express my ideas about female fertilization of oocytes and bodily autonomy. Fertilization is complex and can become more complex depending on circumstances, and a female can find herself fertilized against her wishes…only she should decide what is to become of her oocytes upon fertilization. 

The red in the photographs represents the oocytes and the decisions that may arise upon fertilization of those eggs and the blue represents tranquility upon making those difficult decisions. In imaginative tableaus, these images celebrate women, alluding to imagination, sensations of isolation, and femininity. This work contemplates the complexities of being a women by using color, and texture to draw attention within the photograph to psychologically reference the strength of being a women.

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With the closing of the community darkroom in San Francisco, my darkroom rituals became dissrupted. The question that came to mind - what next?  The inbetween and continuation of what’s next hung in the air.

These shots are the inbetween - the sun and the moon - my daily encounters, and inspirations. My interests of light, and shadow,  fleeting moments that make me pull the trigger. 

The images allude to a larger dialogue - the covid era: the displacement of peoples, symbols of death, memorials of injustices that have been done to brown and black bodies, and yet we find our nation crying over toilet paper - that toilet paper becomes historically symbolic - the heavy issues at hand that are still left unresolved. Me moving, and adapting to my body changes,  of me leaving familiar things behind and documenting them before I walk out the door. 

These fleeting urges of life happening  “as is.”  The stuff at first view can easily be overlooked, but somehow they fit in with the way I make sense of the world. These images are a visual journal of the times I live in.

My thoughts continue to wax and wane…

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