The border wall is a parasite that extracts from its host to evolve. The US/Mexico border is used to determine territorial limits that allow for national sovereignty. Yet the Rio Grande Valley, Texas, is the new frontier for an interplanetary society. Within these boundaries - The US/Mexico border wall, the United States Checkpoint, and the Kármán line 60 miles above us - strategies of power are acted out. The blood-filled assemblage of capital, counterfits, surveillance, violence, policing, and mass incarceration contribute to sculpting a model migrant or citizen of the borderlands. This person is docile, resilient, able to withstand physical stress, underpaid, and not fast enough. In my long-distance intimate auto-ethnographic studio, I do not work in a series. Works are set in the past, present, and future. Works are portraiture, Cadaverine 1%, documentation, HEPA Filters, cardboard boxes, Axe Dark Temptation, and fabrication of scenarios that create a chain reaction of mythological storytelling beyond the borderlands, crossing evidence with alchemy. My starting point is the presence of aerospace factories in these lands. These companies are SpaceX and United Launch Alliance. I appropriate from my father's labor as a factory worker, down to .001 inches of sweat. He worked as a structural mechanic for 34 years at United Launch Alliance, an intimate relationship between Lockheed Martin and Boeing in Harlingen, Texas. During breaks and dirty jokes, my dad and his friends shot magically sanitized rivets, constructing the Atlas V rocket. The payload faring includes the Mars Curiosity Rover as well as the means for space exploration, colonization, warfare, surveillance satellites, militarized communications, and weather analysis. I use curiosity and technical perfection in my gridded dioramas, large-scale inkjet prints, to magnify the catastrophe of these worlds collapsing. The body is staged, shirtless, dusty, with stainless steel reflection, sterilized for new lands.

Lenses

New Again, 2025, Chopped Ponytail, Newspaper

I want this piece to change every time. The newspaper used should be from the day this piece is shown. The page should be chosen by whoever is showing the work. 

This work came from a journal article I read about the cleansing of migrants who just crossed the US/Mexico border. The United States believed that whoever was crossing into the country was dirty and filled with lice. Every person had to get their clothing sanitized, every man had their head shaved, and every woman had their hair washed with gasoline/alcohol. In addition to this, their bodies were sterilized. Newspaper was used as a placemat for the hair that was cut off of people. This placemat was latter burned to ash obliterating the old, dusty, dirty, filthy, lice contaminated hair. 
There was no image with this description. I thought it was beautiful that newspaper, with all its content, gossip, politics, movie showings, and local events was used as a placemat, as a tool for steralization.

iPad 2, The last product steve jobs introduced before his death

A buffalo believed to have been black diamond, it is not black diamond. But I still like this photo. I want to have it printed using a gelatin silver laser process. 

I want to put a framed photo of the buffalo believed to have been black diamond with the Ipad 2 inside this dishwasher basket. 

Geranimo Beheaded Eagle Tombstone Inkjet Print, Ziploc Bag

My Battery is Low and Its Getting Dark, Inkjet Print, 2025

California Zephyr

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