Thank you for coming to this website. I write this note overlooking a window.

 

From here, I look out at two countries that meet on the southside of my hometown of El Paso, Texas. While this is a view laced with discernible boundaries, I have always seen my hometown as more than the territorial boundary of the nation. To me, El Paso represents an idea. It is a city built on the pursuit of a life in the making. I first learned this when seeing my grandfather’s greencard. The greencard, embossed with the stamped letters of ‘U’ and ‘S’, made me realize how ‘U’ and ‘S’ stand not only for the U.S., but grew to include ‘us.’

 

Thus, in exploring questions of America, I produce images on salvaged blue jeans from the Salvation Army. Each textile is rendered 100% from cotton thread. Making threaded images on denim not only represents American questions. Thread and denim were two materials that dictated El Paso’s economy, when the city was once the denim capitol of the world. After NAFTA, the industry disappeared with the tossing of desert dust. Now, in the studio, I use a machine that was once employed in a factory during the denim boom. I will never know who operated this machine before—but the labor is not lost.

 

Confronting the ghosts of efforts past, I reckon with the fact that the country changes. Each day I grapple with conflicting creative forces that comprise a struggled hope. When I think of my grandfather, dream of future visions left unforeseen, or wonder who used the Brother sewing machine, I realize that beauty is in the making. Beauty is transient, yet powerful, in the same way that wind moves us. However, no matter how elusive beauty is, its force comes from hard-won effort. Afterall, beauty sometimes comes from a glistening sweat. So regardless of the circumstances we contend with, I still dream. Why? Because when I make with my hands, I realize how a nation’s life process is just as broken as it is beautiful.