This was my first solo show after graduate school—a semi-retrospective, if you can call it that. The 14th Floor was just starting, and I wanted to bring attention to the works I was most excited about—not just what I had made, but what I was making sense of. How do you put your best self forward when you’re still figuring out who that self is?
I started with a personal ad. Not a real one—something fictional. A Latinx artist-scholar: “Very Good Looking: Brn hair eyes & stache sks safe place to call home. I’m friendly, indpndnt, college-educated, hard-working & in excel. shape. American but often mistaken for a foreigner.” The language of the ad became the tone of the exhibition. A little cheeky, a little lonely. Descriptive, but also performative. I wanted to test how desire gets translated into artwork—how identity gets listed, cataloged, styled.
Mirrors with gold surfaces. A work titled Dry Clean Only, a designer blazer with a name tag reading Hired Help—evocative of a closet, the garment exhibited on hanger, waiting for someone to put it on. Drawings made on pink slips. A shirt turned into a dress, stitched with journal entries, pouring out like spilled memories. Large-scale prints of four words—Relevance, Narrative, Self, and Certainty—dirty words in art, reimagined from Logan Pearsall Smith’s Four Romantic Words, evidence of critical investigation into neologisms and the emergence of words into our language.
At the center of the show was a large simulated woodblock print of an anatomical heart, titled So That the Sun May Rise. A print that felt devotional, an offering for another day, for a life to be seen. Very Good Looking was also the first time I presented the Auto Refill Portraits—an archive of internet image searches for “Latinx.” The stereotypical images I encountered were printed onto pills, photographed displayed like petri dishes—slick and clinical, but human too. What does it mean to be consumed? To be prescribed? To be “read” before being seen?
The exhibition was a way of showing myself while also showing the construct. Not a reveal, but a self-interruption. A reminder that the figure on view is also the one setting the stage, and is also potentially the one looking.