Shadow Puppet Deities
Why not you?, 2025, 24 × 24 in, Acrylic and stain on wood panel
For the last couple of years, I’ve had this image of a taxidermy deer head…
The kind that were a-plenty and ever-present at my dad’s place growing up, and now lurk in the basement of my mother’s house. (Ask my sister how they got there.) That antlered presence has been haunting my concepts for new paintings. I’ve finally figured out a way to bring that imagery into my work in a way that excites me. I’ve created two animal deities—one a deer, the other a bull/carabao—as another way to represent aspects of ourselves.
Horror and folklore remain central inspirations. I’m fascinated by how we create monsters—because it is easier to deal with something clearly unreal than to confront the real horrors that happen between people, including the uncomfortable truths we carry within ourselves.
Recently, while researching “mixed-race publications,” I came across a title that claimed the mixed-race experience upholds the construct of race. I hadn’t really thought about that before. I believe naming something—like being able to say the name Voldemort—is powerful. However, I can’t help but be affected by this idea.
I immediately thought of white nationalists and neo-Nazis who call mixed-race people blasphemous. I had always assumed that was just about numbers. But after seeing that article, I realized it’s more layered than that.
Something I’ve been trying to portray in my work is how internalizing racial bias manifests in the mirror and shapes a person’s self-understanding. The experience of being mixed is constantly shifting—haunting us as we try to decipher which parts of ourselves feel more real, or whose opinion of our identity is more reliable.
The presence of people who shift between racial categories—who don’t fit neatly into any one box—is inherently threatening to the construct of race.
Mixed-race people don’t uphold the construct of race, rather highlight that racial categorization is just another monster we’ve dreamed up to justify what we do to others.
