Cultivated pleasure creates the illusion of a universal standard to determine what is attractive. This standard is not an ideal, but rather shaped by culture, offering us opportunities to belong and inhabit a world built upon perfection, harmony, and beauty. A world that welcomes and appreciates things. This is taste: woven into the fibers of our nature, like judgment. Some might say our will is bound to and appeals to taste... 

I have never been able to fully comprehend what makes something beautiful, nor what makes others find my work beautiful. Why do many assume it is about beauty? I too can agree that my work is beautiful, but how else is it experienced and understood?

In my experience as an artist, making work is an improvisation with culture that gratifies the senses, and not a rationalization of what beauty is. 

Beauty is an elaborate and treacherous labyrinth based on subjective opinion, unfixed and inconclusive, immeasurable in clear quantitative terms. I might even propose that beauty is its own distinct emotion, a learned and nurtured state with a certain charm.

Beauty relies on different models of style to coexist in satisfaction with others, unpredictable, changing with time and constantly evolving. Beauty is a web of tightly knit references (references to personal experiences, references that have kept us company or benefited us in any sort of way, references that resonate with ones own history), a web which obstructs us from understanding the full depths of its meaning.

I have come to realize that beauty conceals a larger conversation about time, consequences and assumptions. Beauty is not absolute or immutable. Thus I can only ask around beauty instead of asking what it is, if I hope to understand how my work functions in its context. The work cannot be dependent on values, ideals, usefulness, good, bad, real, false, etc., since these variables are precarious and subject to change.

  In the process of making my work, I encounter unpredictable problems beyond aesthetics and attractiveness. These challenges create conceptual space to ask around beauty and investigate temporal and material consequences. For example, in Vidrio Espejo I was concerned with addressing a found object’s encountered form and context, and repairing it in such a way that its original fractures were reproduced in its final exhibited form.

Once they leave the studio, my objects have their own authority, accepting the limitations of their past in the present tense, and building a case for new incidental futures.