Oh America the Great reflects on a promise that has never been equally given, only differently demanded. I make this work out of a growing exhaustion with the demand to believe in an America that must be made “great again.” I am still searching for the moment in history that this promise refers to. My paintings, drawings, installations, and my own body all return to the same questions: Are we great? And if so, for whom? I have looked for answers in the spaces that shape our school corridors, the bureaucracy of our immigration policies, and the quiet normalization of violence and discrimination, to which I have yet to find a truth that holds for everyone.

I am unapologetically political because my existence is already politicized. I am a Latino, born in the United States, and I have grown up watching my citizenship treated as something conditional. Something to be demonstrated, verified, and performed. It is measured through documents, language, behavior, and perception, while the nation that demands this proof shields itself behind symbols, slogans, and the language of “law and order.”

This work does not attempt neutrality. It is built from intention. Whether drawing with graphite or using a firearm to mark a surface, I am engaging with the materials and systems that define contemporary American life. Flags, documents, personal belongings, and the body itself become sites of tension—places where identity is assigned, questioned, or stripped away. I use what is accessible, disposable, and immediate because I am responding to a culture that invests heavily in control and enforcement, while failing to protect the lives it claims to value.

You; the viewer, are not separate from this body of work. Your presence, your decisions, and your discomfort are part of its structure. You may agree, resist, disengage, or confront it directly, but youare implicated in the same systems it examines. This exhibition asks not only what America claimsto be, but what it requires of those who live within it—and what that cost continues to be.