I am a Peruvian-American artist. My work, which revolves around the consequences of colonization in Latin American contemporary culture, is a visual investigation of aesthetics, cultural survival, and inheritance. I focus on Latin American history, particularly that of Perú, because it is the reality with which I am familiar. I do so, convinced that its complexity has universal characteristics and any conclusion can be understood beyond the frame of its uniqueness.

While growing up my visual surroundings were always the same: contemporary urban and rural scenery against the monolithic presence of pre-columbian and catholic colonial aesthetics, both of which conform and define Peruvian landscapes. My identity as a person and as an artist is marked by them and my body of work often summons their presence. Art produced in colonized territories up to modern times is often developed by populations compelled to follow an aesthetics that doesn’t reflect them. It intrigues me how such imposition has been accepted and negotiated, and how art makers may preserve characteristics of their own aesthetics in spite of cultural alienation. I believe that my work continues the efforts that were initiated at the time of conquest by my ancestors in order to survive as culture. In my work I approach Pre-Columbian aesthetics searching for cultural and ethnic commonalities, claiming them as my heritage while engaging the audience in conversations about colonization and coloniality, contemporary history, social injustice and racism. I envision societies with symmetrical opportunities for their different aesthetics to blossom. I envision a pluriversal aesthetic landscape where we all have the opportunity to be ourselves without ethnic, racial or cultural labels that undermines the power of our artistic speech.

Many years ago I saw an exhibition of Rauschenberg’s work in Mexico. I found the exhibition, albeit strong in typical Americana references, unrelated and disconnected to my Latin American heritage, both culturally and visually. I believe I have a wealth of visual information that corresponds more closely to my cultural make up. Pre-columbian art is my most genuine aesthetic inheritance. It is what people who look like me created to their likeness, long ago, when they were the center of their own universe.

Included here are works from several series. For PLUNDER ME, BABY, I wonder what would happen if pre-columbian ceramics in any museum of the world were to wake up from centuries of sleep. What would they think or feel, out of context and stripped of meaning? What would it be for them to be prisoners in a beautiful display or stacked in captivity in an anthropological museum’s storage room? I imagine them in despair and fear, and overcoming their defeat; owning themselves, no longer victims but witnesses of history, transcending their own existence. The title of the series is a defiance, a teasing invitation to futile aggression, for they are beyond harm. Individually their titles are composed of racial slurs still very much in use in Perú and Latin America. There is a sardonic commentary following each of them, stressing common stereotypes and condescending social perception.

WAQ’AS AND PACHAMAMAS depart from my prior referencing of early anthropomorphic representations, and acknowledge and convoke entities to a conceptual foreground as hypothetical imaginaries from “otherness.” Respectfully acknowledging surviving pre-colonial entities such as Pachamama protects and retains “their” memory, which lends an opportunity for reinvention as a second chance, to align a historical narrative on decolonizing terms. Borrowing Wari aesthetics, “Pachamama” is not idol, but earth, an inclusive omnipresent entity. “She” is where plants grow and birds sing, even if suffocated under cement, never losing the capacity to support life. I aspire to inform and affirm the ubiquity of non-Western entities, researching the geographical, and historical strata of archetypical landmarks, imagining and materializing their Pachamamas, rigorously informed by my findings.

A MI VIDA (TO MY VIDA) is a series of portraits of my daughter, who was conceived when I was 48. The idea of creating these intimate works came from anticipating the moment of separation, following American custom, in which children leave the house early in life. I give myself a chance to embrace her, forever, if only her effigy. But A MI VIDA is more than that. Within the frame of our political landscape it speaks of the pain of a parent and child separated by force at the border of this country. A MI VIDA is an urgent plea for empathy and protection against cruelty. Each piece has been made to be carried by a mother’s arms, they don’t belong on pedestals, their ideal presentation/state is within our arms. A MI VIDA is also a performance. It consists of my offering these figures to the audience to hold, and help me appease their crying.

CORPUS engages with and confronts Perú’s colonial past, which reverberates in the construction of mestizo identity. The 15 sculptures that comprise CORPUS are entities who have survived for centuries beneath the guise of Catholic icons revered in the annual celebration of Corpus Christi in Cusco, Perú. Syncretic imagery blends pre-Columbian symbols and forms with European Catholic iconographies, asserting that these pre-Columbian entities were not vanquished, but blended with their Catholic counterparts, ensuring survival. Banners were commissioned to Peruvian artisans who craft traditional religious banners. The red tables reference legged structures carried by youths to rest the effigies on when not in motion in the procession. CORPUS is exhibited with an installation of flash lights and sound that seeks to provoke feelings of exposure and invasion from cultural “paparazzi.” The video with my father’s voice praying, has a Peruvian military march marking the real icons passing.