from Mi Casa Es Su Casa

My parents, born in Los Angeles, came of age during the Zoot Suit/Pachuco era of the late 1940's and experienced the over-handed Americanization programs in public schools designed to erase traces of "Mexican-ness". Using family photographs primarily from the 1940's-1960's as a starting point, the question of what the photo reveals and conceals about identity through the codes of the landscape, the pose, architecture, fashion and design inspired an investigation of the uneasy and slippery terrain of "representation" itself.

Through my attempts to undo the fixed and reductive nature of the photo, I found myself paradoxically attempting to develop new modes of representation. The mediums of photography is questioned while simultaneously used in search of a visual language that permits shifting, non-reductive portrayals that are as dense and multi-layered as the landscape we navigate through.