Archipelagos

The Archipelagos series responds to 18th century “Casta” portraits and early colonial maps. Casta paintings depicted interracial families and were used to enforce rigid social caste systems in New Spain and the Philippines. Colonial maps imposed similar social constraints, dividing land masses and communities by arbitrary borders. By abstracting geometric and figurative elements from these historic images, I confront painting as an inherited social structure used to divide and marginalize. I apply techniques of glazing, graphing, and framing similar to those found in Casta paintings and maps to create obscured landscape figurations that are defined through a process of erasure.