Invisible Lives, Invisible Work emerges from an exploration of my identity as a Chicano artist and my desire to understand my family’s history within the broader story of Chicano and Latino communities in America. Through this work, I revisit personal archives and inherited memories to examine both intimate family narratives and histories that often exist at the margins of collective memory. Each piece is built through subtle shifts in red, tuned so closely in tone they nearly disappear into one another. Figures and fragments lie submerged within the image, only surfacing when the viewer lingers long enough to notice. Their obscured presence is intentional. I use visibility itself as a metaphor for the ways Chicano and Latino lives and contributions throughout American history have existed in plain sight, yet remained unseen unless someone chooses to look.
I use red for the many meanings it carries: blood and love, warning and celebration, and labor. Within these near-invisible fields of red, I embed moments from my family’s lives as migrant farmworkers, soldiers, a homecoming queen, and within the everyday experiences that shaped them. These are personal traces held at the threshold of visibility, much like the labor and contributions that sustained generations yet often remained unseen or unacknowledged.
By making visibility fragile, these works ask viewers to confront the quiet presence of what is often overlooked. They hold space for lives and histories that have been flattened or forgotten, insisting that looking itself can be an act of care.
