Artist Statement

I am an artist and storyteller working across digital media, sculpture, and installation. My practice examines the intersections between history, technology, and ideology through the lens of virtual reconstruction. I contextualize historical themes that explore globalization, patriotism, and philosophical questions surrounding the American status quo. By moving between physical and digital worlds, I use art as a means to question how collective identity and national mythologies are constructed, performed, and remembered over time.

I am interested in how technology and digital media are used to interpret and represent history, society, and culture. Drawing from archival sources, military maps, and historical photographs, I fabricate new narratives that blur the line between documentation and imagination. Much of my work engages with World War II and Cold War histories—not to reenact them, but to reexamine how they continue to shape contemporary notions of heroism, violence, and progress. By re-staging these moments within digital environments, I seek to expose how historical memory becomes a mediated experience, filtered through cinematic conventions, national pride, and virtual simulation.

My process often involves building immersive environments within video game engines, such as Arma 3, to create machinima films and interactive installations. These digital landscapes are not simple recreations; they are speculative reconstructions based on fragmented archives, oral histories, and personal interpretation. I merge found and fabricated materials—historical documents, 3D scans, and sound recordings—to form spaces that feel both familiar and estranged. The result is an atmosphere that mirrors the dissonance between truth and representation, where viewers navigate between memory, myth, and code.

In addition to my digital work, I integrate sculptural and installation-based elements that bridge the physical and virtual. Wood, cardboard, and found materials often appear as artifacts or architectural fragments drawn from the virtual terrains I construct. This dialogue between tangible and simulated matter reflects my broader interest in how technology extends, replaces, or erases material memory. My works operate as sites of contemplation—where digital ruins become stand-ins for real histories and imagined futures.

My practice is influenced by artists and theorists who interrogate the politics of image-making and simulation, such as Hito Steyerl, Harun Farocki, and Jon Rafman. I also draw from post-internet art, conceptual film, and game design as frameworks for rethinking storytelling in contemporary culture. As a first-generation Salvadoran American, I approach history as both participant and observer—attuned to the legacies of migration, war, and cultural survival. These experiences inform my perspective on empire and the aesthetics of power, guiding my exploration of how ideology is encoded into the very structures of media.

Currently, I am developing a series of machinima videos and installations that expand on these ideas by merging archival research with speculative world-building. Through this ongoing body of work, I aim to create spaces that invite viewers to confront how history is mediated—how it is reconstructed, consumed, and continually rewritten through digital technology.