PROCESS

Cutis Urbana began on the street. Each piece is grounded in fieldwork across specific Miami neighborhoods: low-lying wetlands, aging vernacular houses, chain-link property lines, glass towers rising on higher ground, cracked concrete never quite repaired. These photographs are the raw evidence of a territory under pressure, the material I carry back into the studio.

That evidence is then translated through two opposing gestures. Thread anchored across the surface stands in for the measurable forces shaping the territory (elevation, capital, human and sensory flows, flood risk, property value). Meanwhile, expanses of white plaster and raw ground act as erasure: the whitening and blanking out of a neighborhood's history by real estate specifiers. Controlled burning registers what data cannot hold: rupture, memory, and the emotional residue of a place. The fire is a repeated act, worked directly into canvas, plaster, and raw matter until the surface itself carries the scar of what the neighborhood has been through: renovated, redlined, erased, rebuilt.

The result is a surface that holds at once the geometry of thread, the unpredictable edge of char and the colors of urban spaces. Together they hold what a map can show and what going through the territory actually feels like.