PERSONAL WORK
Words From My JournalAlongside my professional work, I maintain a personal art practice. This page brings together a series of visual poems. Each work begins as a line, thought, or fragment written in my journal and is translated directly into a visual composition.
Working primarily in Photoshop, I use collage, texturing, and typography to build compositions shaped by the emotions at hand. I don’t begin with a fixed plan, just the words in my journal. The work unravels as I’m making it, and the series grows over time as new motivation surfaces.
I have primarily used imagery from the Library of Congress. I think it’s funny how we tend to think of the U.S. government as this massive, abstract force, and then it resolves into what I like to imagine as a single person somewhere, deciding what gets preserved and saved for the future. It humors me to think that what defines our endless nation culturally often comes down to that guy, just nerding out. Does the Library speak for all of us? How could it.
There’s something eerie about that.
ANYWAYS, I find it grounding to work with material that has been deliberately collected and preserved over time. I like the constraint, and the contrast that drawing from a fixed body of material has with the content-heavy world we live in now, where images are constantly produced, randomly selected, or generated without much consideration.
Written while looking out over the city from the Chauncey Street subway station. A meditation on frequent relocation, familiarity, and the muscle memory of moving through places that no longer fully belong to you.
A reflection on vulnerability, and the feeling of being exposed while still unseen. The tension between opening up and being misunderstood.
A poem about being haunted by someone and trying to haunt them back. A push and pull that feels almost telepathic. Some nights, when your fight is spent, they do all the work.
A poem about waiting, stagnation, and the suffocating pause between potential and motion.
An exploration of aimlessness and anxiety. The feeling of being suspended between the familiar and the unknown, trapped yet learning to accept where you are.
I wrote this poem in my dad's memory in 2019. The imagery is of Shea Stadium, the now-defunct and demolished home of the New York Mets. The image overlaying Shea is the play I most associate with my Dad and Shea Stadium, in which Endy Chavez makes a miraculous home run robbery to keep the game tied 1-1 in the win-or-go-home game of the 2006 National League Championship Series.
A game that my dad was at.
In reality, the game is known for its notorious ending in which superstar Carlos Beltran strikes out looking to lose the game for the Mets... and not this catch.
The Endy Chavez Catch is life, and the Carlos Beltran Strikeout is death. A reminder that life means very little if you are too afraid to swing the bat.
An extract from the final letter of a love laid to rest. Written in 2022, these words hold personal significance and reflect beauty, reflection, and growth over time.
This ones about having a crush on a cute artist :)
A reflection on the quiet shame of boredom, and having zero plans on a friday night.
A commission for @kafkas.doll, made to accompany a piece of her writing on the unherited ideas about submission, love, and what it means to be accepted.
An exploration of the insecurity that can surface in the quiet moments of a new relationship, when silence feels charged rather than calm.
A poem about the duality of love and abandonment, acceptance and rejection. The pain of disconnection paired with the instinct to protect oneself.