As a mid-career Los Angeles artist of Latin ancestry, I have spent the past decade making a multi-faceted series of paintings and works on paper based on the US-Mexico border. These works challenge common conceptions of the border as a region of purely political and economic value, and move its conversations towards a more nuanced aggregate of cultural, geographic, and psychological dimensions. As news cycles envision the border solely as a site of binary arguments, such as those surrounding immigration policy and humanitarian urgency, a broader picture includes the construct of nationalism, the border’s portrayal within a mythic, “untamed” American west, and a set of topographies that oscillate between amoral landscapes and conceptual finitudes.  

Recently, new paintings have focused on stretches of borderlands in the high and low desert between Jacumba, California, and Mexicali, Mexico. Relying heavily on photo documentation of these unpopulated spaces, with their flora, fauna, and geologic intensity that seem to defy the border wall that cuts through it, these images suggest the border’s relationship to “deep time,” of a tectonic migration that occurs over epochs. As a reframing of such borderlands, my work serves as a way for viewers to participate with these places in a more fragile, omniscient, theoretical, and sensorial manner.