I grew up between the San Gabriel Valley and a town in Sonora, about five hours from here. It was a border upbringing, and that’s shaped everything—how I think about identity, how I make work.

I’ve always identified as an artist. Even as a kid, if someone asked what I wanted to be, the answer never changed. It wasn’t until I was around 21 that it started to take a more specific form. I went to school for painting, and that’s when I realized there was more out there than just making paintings.

That’s what led me to illustration and graphic design—art with a more specific function. Around that time, I got into zines and artist books, and that really shifted everything. Coming from skateboarding, punk, playing music—finding independent publishing felt like the most autonomous thing you could do. You could create something lasting with almost no resources.

And books… they carry weight. People don’t throw them away. They get passed down. That idea—that something you make could outlast you, or at least outlast its original context—that’s really the foundation of why I do it.

Yeah, I think what pulled me away from painting was a desire to work with others.

Graphic design gave me a broader toolset—more ways to apply what I was doing across different spaces. It’s a huge field, but for me it was about precision. When you have the right tools, you can say what you want to say more clearly.

I had a job where I was doing design every day—Photoshop, Illustrator—and that’s when I realized I didn’t need to be doing this for someone else. I could do it on my own. I started to see patterns, and more importantly, I saw that I could bring people into it. It didn’t have to be isolated.

Over the last couple years, I’ve started thinking less like an individual artist and more like a studio. There’s the fine art, and then there’s illustration, design—different outputs, but all coming from the same place.

If you want to live like an artist, you have to wear every hat. Not just making the work, but printing it, distributing it, putting it into the world. That’s part of the practice.

I think it starts with recognizing what’s in your control and what isn’t—which is basically everything.

We’re all participating in consumer culture, whether we like it or not. Even if you think you’re outside of it, you’re not. So the question becomes: how do you work within that without reinforcing it?

For me, it’s about making objects that carry meaning beyond vanity. That’s where books come in again. If something lasts long enough, the context around it changes. And when that happens, it can actually resist the moment it came from.

There’s a lot of design that only makes sense right now. Ten years from now, it’s embarrassing. It disappears. But if you can make something that holds up across time—that’s powerful.

Writing is central to everything I do. I keep a lot of journals—sketchbooks, but more like writing spaces.

At some point I realized I was writing poetry, even if I didn’t want to call it that. It just became part of the process. And then it started feeding everything else—music, visual work, books.

It’s all connected. If I’m writing, I can apply that to music. If I’m making books, that connects back to drawing. Everything feeds into itself.

Writing is kind of the thread that runs through all of it.

When you explained the idea behind it, it immediately made sense. especially thinking about consumption and clothing.

No one can deny they’re part of that system. Every company is producing waste, whether they admit it or not. So the idea of actually working with that, taking used garments and giving them new life—that felt real.

The “non-uniform uniform” idea really stuck with me. That things don’t need to be perfect or identical. Each piece can carry its own variation, its own history.

That’s how I think about zines, too. The point isn’t perfection, it’s making something, and letting the imperfections become part of it.

We used a drop cloth from my studio that had years of paint, ink, overspray on it. We printed from that and turned it into patches, sewing them onto garments.

So each piece is literally a record of what was happening in the studio over time. Every shirt is different because the source material is different.

I never thought I’d make clothing that functioned like that—almost like a document.

Yeah. Sewing and working with fabric has always been part of my life. My mom, my aunt, my wife—they all sew. It’s always been there.

So bringing that into the process made it more meaningful. It wasn’t just production—it was something shared.

It reinforced this idea that being an artist isn’t just about making objects. It’s about how you move through the world, who you involve, how things come together.

Yeah, definitely.

Growing up between places, you hear phrases like “ni de aquí ni de allá”—not from here, not from there. That sense of not fully belonging anywhere sticks with you.

And it’s not just geographic. It shows up in everything—culture, expectations, even within your own community. There are stereotypes that people project onto each other, and it’s hard to escape that.

For me, things like zines, writing, design—they became a way to connect those worlds. They let everything exist at once.

I don’t think of myself as working in one medium. It’s more like a continuous process—music, writing, drawing, publishing—all feeding into each other.

That’s where it starts to feel complete.