I incise white marks into black surfaces with a knife. Called sgraffito, my drawing method originated in 13th century German wall decoration, and later was used to embellish ceramics in 16th century Italy. This method of humble artistic origin, now helps me cast light across scenes cobbled from myriad circumstances, times and places.

Junctures in human history that magnify iniquity, adaptability and heroism have fixed my attention since I was a child. I often visit sites where accounts of conflict and valor barely keep pace with unfolding history and current events. Days spent in these places provide me with the sensations of light and dark, anxiety and odor that I require for my work.

My current focus is Ciudad Juarez. In this city one sees fiction in action, even an hour is time enough to blend truth with myth. I have traveled to sites of recent executions, photo-documented known “death houses” where members of the Juarez cartel have tortured, murdered and buried fellow citizens. To the west of Juarez I have visited an asylum for the city’s disinherited. This makeshift desert refuge is the distillate of the city and houses some 115 souls.

I have been to the Juarez morgue, witnessed the autopsy of a young man fresh from his execution, wandered among the unidentified corpses in the freezers, seen the guns and bullets and maggots and broken instruments of torture pulled from shallow graves.

I steal images. I succumb to historical photographs, the canons of western art, as much as to my own experiences. Glimpses of other times and places encroach and breach boundaries that differentiate what I believe to be true and what I fear, imagine and occasionally hope.