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A death in the family made me reconsider how I was spending my time—and where I was. I took a break from studio work. When I returned, I had to start again.
Algorithms didn’t feel as relevant anymore. But they were still…foundational. That’s where EE.UU. began. With an echo of a word—La-tinks. It was something I overheard. Latinx was emerging in academic circles, appearing at conferences, in program titles. I was interested in what that term could hold—and what it couldn’t. And given that I was at my own crossroads, I felt especially motivated to open this term up, and get messy with meaning, making, and modeling. In Spanish “EE.UU.” is an abbreviation for "Estados Unidos," the United States. In this work, it became an acronym: exquisite expression, unsettling utterance. EE. UU. is an excavation. A way of transcribing digital subjectivity into something more analog. Less coded, more embodied. I was looking for an aesthetic language that could hold the complexity of a shifting identity. Something in between the database and the diary. These works attempt to pull meaning out of abstraction—to make visible what often remains amorphous and unreal. A “migration” from digital space to something grounded in the now. And, a correlative making approach that relied on collage, on revealing layers of surfaces, of meanings and forcing works to exist in ambivalence.
Images from this series were featured in Cultural Dynamics Volume 29, Issue 3 (August 2017), in a short essay exploring how Latinx is given meaning. The work draws on personal experience and visual art research to consider observational strategies for sharing—and shaping—perception. The issue, Theorizing LatinX, was edited by Claudia Milian.
Algorithms didn’t feel as relevant anymore. But they were still…foundational. That’s where EE.UU. began. With an echo of a word—La-tinks. It was something I overheard. Latinx was emerging in academic circles, appearing at conferences, in program titles. I was interested in what that term could hold—and what it couldn’t. And given that I was at my own crossroads, I felt especially motivated to open this term up, and get messy with meaning, making, and modeling. In Spanish “EE.UU.” is an abbreviation for "Estados Unidos," the United States. In this work, it became an acronym: exquisite expression, unsettling utterance. EE. UU. is an excavation. A way of transcribing digital subjectivity into something more analog. Less coded, more embodied. I was looking for an aesthetic language that could hold the complexity of a shifting identity. Something in between the database and the diary. These works attempt to pull meaning out of abstraction—to make visible what often remains amorphous and unreal. A “migration” from digital space to something grounded in the now. And, a correlative making approach that relied on collage, on revealing layers of surfaces, of meanings and forcing works to exist in ambivalence.
Images from this series were featured in Cultural Dynamics Volume 29, Issue 3 (August 2017), in a short essay exploring how Latinx is given meaning. The work draws on personal experience and visual art research to consider observational strategies for sharing—and shaping—perception. The issue, Theorizing LatinX, was edited by Claudia Milian.
EE UU
