Senior Comps
In my comps I grapple with how drug use and labor informs different areas of my life. The labor that went into executing this project, though nowhere near as physically arduous, parallels in time the labor that my father Armando performs thousands of miles away in South Florida.
Working to create the foundations of buildings he may never occupy, Armando serves as an example of the extraordinary imagination he must cultivate to persevere in a world antagonistic to his presence but not to his exertions.
Were it not for him I would not be making the kind of work that I am today.
Throughout my comps, I explored how to depict personal experiences with drugs in ways that obfuscate a clear and direct retelling. I grounded some of my earliest paintings and representation of memory recall in paper bags and shipping material from the liquor store I worked at. I experimented with physical barriers to imagery and use a vast array of colors in my paintings to depict the altered perception of reality where emotion is not tied so clearly to tone or color.
Under the influence of drugs, one’s perceptions are altered to the point that the experiences they have become exemplary moments which either sustain their investment in drugs or drive them to find other means of coping. I wanted this process of narrativizing drug use to be reflected in the ambiguity of my materials and associations between them once I moved towards sculpture.
As the term progressed, I examined how drug use and labor are related to each other. I considered the different stages at which I had known my father: when he was an alcoholic 13 years ago and now as an obsessive construction worker. Why does my father invest so much of his days and even nights to excruciating labor? Having lived with an eating disorder for most of my life, my relationship with labor is contentious. The value Latinx people ascribe to their ability to perform labor was not something I could realistically see in myself without also feeling shame. Reconciling how my father valued his job despite the toll it took on his body with my own ideas about self-worth became a topic that I also needed to explore in my comps.
The work of Theaster Gates served as a model for me to consider the materials my father handles everyday as well as the meaning behind his obsessive attention to his work.
In the restoration of an abandoned building, Gates distilled his work down to the equation “Labor + Love = Value,” and I think the work that both my father and I do is an exemplification of that sentiment too.
By repurposing salvaged material in “Black Vessel for a Saint,” Gates imbued bricks from a church that resided in a historically black neighborhood and a statue of Saint Laurence with renewed energetic meaning founded on their previous significance.
The religious associations he maintains are something I have also mirrored in my work, as drug use can often present new ways of viewing one’s body as a vessel and conduit for energetic transmutation of ideas into art.
