OUR LATEX AND STEEL HERITAGE, 2022

Steel, latex, silicone, nylon, cellulose, human hair. 81” x 68” x 49”

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Through home-chef cyborg and Taino Duho sculpture aesthetics, Our Latex and Steel Heritage is a body of apocalyptic origins from the colonial genocide of the Caribbean's indigenous populations to the present disenfranchisement of the Latino working class. In its reference to the Taino Duho, the form channels the spiritual and ritual body later appropriated by the Spanish Planter chair- furniture of the colonial power. This revisited Duho is an opportunity to understand how Taino animality and corporeality might manifest in our contemporary environment of industrial labor. The welded armature embodies predator and prey as it resembles a creature on four legs collapsing into its enlarged, gaping mouth. Silicone casts of hand-carved skin are stretched and sewn over the steel while graphs of dislocated silicone finger colonies exude. With exposed internal components, the viewer's perception of the sculpture straddles between object and creature- calling towards an abject embodiment. Our Latex and Steel Heritage historizes what some may claim "a dystopic future" and proclaims it our past and our lived reality. A body, long subjected to extractive stresses, dramatically inherits the materiality of its circumstances.