We live symbiotically with artifice - ornamentation is a human need. 40,000-year-old string skirts found in bogs were not to keep warm, they were to emphasize dance. The question becomes, when does something die? When it no longer moves - not necessarily in a kinetic sense. Locomotion is part of it, but there's psychic reverberation from objects. Sculpture is a bit more dead in the kinetic sense, but more alive in the charged object sort of way. It's an act of transfer.

That we're afraid of each other. It's a way of swapping out the horror and particularity of the Other for generic, known territory - a road map. Mostly in sex. This is how beauty standards form. I’ve been able to abstract away from these ideas and am making more alien sort of entities and trips.

I’m confident about color. The more complex it gets the more challenging it is. Before, I wanted to incite desire and use pop & psychedelia - to make it dreamy, attractive, but also have this immediate dissonance. To do that, I'd use poppy pinks, seemingly innocuous and girly, but in uncanny forms. The walls of Burst used Comex “cerdito,” or piglet... here it got stripped out of the objects. In the glazed ceramics, I'd add tones that were harmonious or disruptive, but when the object looks organic already, it starts to feel confusing, putrid. I think about color in terms of luminosity and opacity. I want things to look iridescent, milky, moving, alien. We don't know where they start or begin, they are not clearly contained.

It’s less about a spooky sort of thing, rather that there are other dimensions that science and technology are just starting to understand. There’s sound from blackholes somehow and video footage of cells in orgiastic movement - it’s more that there’s plenty of ways to think about life itself on different scales, through different circuitries.

It was a way to lighten up. I learned how to collaborate. It brought fantasy and community together. I made a good chunk of the sets, danced, participated in others' performances and invited friends to perform. PJ, who you'll notice took most of my photos, is my best friend in New York.

I'm currently teaching at Hunter College. It's taught me so much - to stay curious over being goal-oriented. To let things stay simple while insisting. To listen.

I was there for a decade, so the transformation was radical. There were many chapters and facets - through academic settings, working with project spaces and galleries, but also nightlife as part of my practice. Ritual and magic are present in the ruins, and you live among the ruins. I had a studio next to Templo Mayor, the epicenter of the Mexica empire - that is one of the things I miss the most. But the energy is very dense. It’s real and to be deeply respected. That respect should extend to the living residents too, by the way. The Centro Histórico is chaotic in the day, and during the quarantine when the noise and chaos were cut, I knew there’d be nothing like that silence again.

I’m having a radical return to creating in the material realm, building alien, jelly renders I made with AI years ago. It all feels possible now… I was trying to figure out with all of these industrial processes, but I prefer more direct making. If I work with a fabricator it has to be a collaboration, not a company or production.. I’m sewing plastics, and using pure paint, playing with glass and ceramic. I want things to be layers of transparency. It’s scarier than it sounds!