I grew up in Texas along the US-Mexican border and I was unaware of how different I was or how different the Rio Grande Valley was from the rest of the country. It was routine to cross into Mexico, and return. At border crossings, access to the US was a simple declaration, “American citizen” and being waved through a line of people. However, by the time I entered university and professional life, unspoken expectations around my citizenship status and appearance effectively tarnished the perceptions I had of myself. Questions like where are you from…really? or How did you get into that school? have become the new routine. Experiencing these inadvertent interrogations — the quizzical engagement around citizenship, education, and racial appearance due to a presumably unconscious bias surrounding appropriateness for social and cultural appearances and credentials — has had a profound effect on my becoming an artist. To what extent can you show how social/cultural perceptions are flawed and ineffectual? And more generally, to what extent does language or strategies of language play in the realization of such perceptions and omissions? These are the questions that motivate my work. My studio practice has concentrated on the creation of a body of interconnected art works exploring an understanding of the conditions that compose and contrast reflections of one’s sense of being. I am focused on revealing ways an individual is compressed into social (vanity) and administrative (labor and rules) systems. I use forms, grids, text, drawings, photos, objects (fabricated or found) and repetitive actions to show ways that lived experience, a reality informed by a racialized and queer body, is categorized and governed by invisible systems and is structured to forget violence and trauma caused by cultural and social dominance.