**This thesis deals with the topic of sexual abuse. Please take care of yourself.** Transcendence is an exploration of faith and Catholicism, and the traumatic impact of institutional sex abuse. This body of work consists of a handmade book, thirteen Instax photos, three collages, and an ambient sound piece. It is the culmination of my time spent in the Masters program at SUNY New Paltz and was exhibited at the December 2022 MFA/BFA show at the Samuel Dorsky Museum. In Transcendence I dissect the wound the priest of my parish inflicted on me, uncovering an inextricable connection between pain and pleasure. Gifts used for grooming an altar boy turn into subversive weapons in a series of instant film photos. Images used to promote the archbishop and the church are cut and reassembled to visualize the living hell I have seen and felt. Representations of faith are cut and reassembled to visualize the living hell I have seen and felt.

I make Vejigantes, a type of traditional Puerto Rican mask typically made from the outer husks of coconuts. Their devilish visages, horrific amalgams of horns and fangs covered in colors and patterns, were meant by colonists and religious fanatics to strike fear into the Puerto Rican community. Once a symbol of religious oppression and fear, Vejigantes are now a symbol of perseverance and celebration in the Puerto Rican community. Working with archival resins and plastic forming, I create contemporary Vejigantes that represent Puerto Ricans’ resilience in the face of disaster, neo-colonial forces, and corporate beasts. My sculptures personify hardships being overcome, transformed from tools of religious extremism and fear into celebratory heritage objects.

These objects serve as metaphors for social concerns and themes of identity, mental health, and human connection. In uncertain and changing times, these works provoke curiosity and express humor to find comfort and hope.

During my studio practice, I wondered how my painting and making could be free and open, maintaining a sense of play from childhood, while also being an anecdote to this plague? Since I believe play and the spirit are deeply connected, was there any sacred imagery of woman-ness from history I could look to in order to release this burden?

Grounded in Indigenous ontologies, Latinx anthropology and nepantla, I seek to understand the sonic and oral traditions that have populated the Americas for millennia as a way to repair, reclaim and reimagine temporalities of healing and to tell stories across time and space. I gaze at the night sky the way my ancestors did, to inquire about how to make sense of the world and ultimately connect with them and their stubborn capacity to survive within us. I re-construct pre-Columbian instruments that have been locked away in museums, reclaiming their sounds and sovereignty. Through this act, my body becomes a vessel for the most primal creative force. I perform so that we may reaffirm our connection to the earth. To adorn these instruments and to turn them into ceremonial objects, I use achiote, mango leaves, shells, tobacco string, and iridescent pigment that reminds me of the skies in the coast of Ecuador, the ancestral homelands of my ancestors who played these instruments. My work is the past and future conjugated in the present. By reclaiming we remember; by remembering we heal. I imagine how sounds and rituals can restore a subjective-geographic relation to living systems and engage with intersectional technologies that can dismantle imperialism and ecological degradation in order to tend to the earth and heal mutually.

I create expressive, colorful vessels and botanical sculptures that complicate the relationship between surface and form. Beginning with historic wallpaper patterns that evoke feminine domestic spaces, I repetitively rework motifs from these sources into illustrations and ceramic objects. I imagine these patterns being squeezed out into space through my hands, peeling themselves off the walls they originated from and taking three-dimensional form. As my work confronts the viewer in the round, I imagine it taking on a life of its own, developing a personality and vibrant agency. I feel that I am able to collaborate with my sculptures, seeking an escape from the historic standards that have been applied to women and their creative work. However, I am also seeking the joy and comfort that can be found by embracing the decorative and elements of my own femininity.

Colonizer legacies in the contemporary Hudson Valley landscape: addressing commerce culture in food systems and the home through absurdist interventions.

I collect things that drive my curiosity; a small selection of those items inspired this body of work. Handmade and repurposed materials merge with printmaking and transform into books that invite the viewer to consider the possibility that flea market finds and lost buttons can hold a bit of joy and wonder. My curios gain new life as soft floral dinosaurs dealing with bullying, an industrious bird building a fashion empire, a desire to hoard things that might be useful, and a somewhat conflicting eBay listing.

Following an evolution of the fishing industry, my tool collections have been created as emblematic objects of human consumerism. My fabricated works draw curiosity with the refined metal objects themselves, but they also incite a sense of danger with sharp lines and points indicating that human consumerism is dangerous and harmful to the environment. My research has focused on the inevitable extinction of the voiceless sea creatures that are rapidly becoming endangered due to human activities. I examine how metals have been used in human history, how they have been wielded toward animals and the environment and I have reinterpreted these tools and weapons through the perspective of an artist. I invite the audience to explore the relationship between self, tools, and the fragile natural world, and to consider the direction in which we will make history on this planet.

My work explores the experiences of immigration, geographical displacement, uprootedness, and acculturation through abstraction. My production is influenced by surrealist automatism where I suppress conscious control over the making process, allowing my unconscious mind to have greater dominance than logical, figurative control. Thus, my creative process captures the simplicity of objects, shapes, and landscapes using texture, dimensionality, and movement that do not attempt to represent a specific depiction of a visual reality, but that altogether evoke curiosity and wondering in the viewers where they assign basic meanings and interpretations to what is observed.