Growing up queer and brown in the borderlands of South Texas, I have always felt a desire to represent unconventional ideas of sexuality and gender performance through visual art. My work deals with the push and pull of the gaze through means of desire and menace. Bodies painted in oil on canvas present themselves to the viewer as enticing and seductive but are often armed or in a ravaging stance.

“My objective is to further deconstruct tools of desire and seduction through decoding body language and the viewer’s relationship to circulated images, antiquity, and canonized painting tropes in history."

The paintings’ centralized figures reference my interest in the “Fag Fatale,” my idea of an effeminate man bringing the world to its knees. The body of work is attributed to Carol Ockman’s 1995 text “Ingres’s Eroticized Bodies” as a means of synthesizing layers of symbols and inspiration into paintings. I use visual language to create exalted alter egos and performative avatars that obscure myself and subject to create power structures that challenge conventionality.