Dog Days on the Chaparral is an installation comprised of three photographic sculptures made in response to the question, “where are you from?” Although I define myself as both Portuguese and American, as someone who immigrated as a child, my identification as either ebbs and flows. The work embodies this slipperiness—a complicated emotional geography. To do so, I fabricate sculptures which collage images of two landscapes, the California chaparral and Portuguese montado, as proxies for these two homes and identities. I employ vernacular building materials, such as lumber and common fasteners, to create a literal and conceptual framework to which I affix an arrangement of contoured photographs. Hacking together disparate materials and technologies to create multi-layered sculptures reflects the Sisyphean efforts made to collage together a sense of home and belonging. The resulting photo objects are both visual and haptic and function as icons or shrines soliciting quiet contemplation of a place just beyond reach. When I contemplate these photo objects, I reflect on my family, our history, in this country and the old country, and collapse the distance between me and that narrative. Although the body of work is rooted in my idiosyncratic immigration experience, it reflects a wider migrant narrative. It may take generations for migrants and their descendants to feel grounded again when forces like poverty and conflict cause homes and nations to crumple like paper. (Exhibited as part of 'Fractured Horizon,' 2020 thesis show of the MFA in Photography and Related Media at Rochester Institute of Technology.)

Exhibited in the 2019 Alternative Process Competition at Soho Photo Gallery, New York, NY.

My latest work features a personal narrative of being a 1.5 generation immigrant in response to the sinister narrative about people born elsewhere who try to make a home in this country. As a Portuguese-American, I have never quite felt at home in the United States, and I have always been reminded of just how foreign I am in my country of birth as well. This dichotomy, represented by the two cliffs, exerts a constant and disproportionate force on my identity, regardless of where I may live, represented here by the monochrome shores of lake Ontario. The stain which divides the two halves of the landscape demonstrates my inability to ever reconcile these two shores.

My first electrocardiogram forced me to confront the latent knowledge that heart disease runs in my family. Having lost my father a year earlier from complications due to heart disease, I felt as if the leads and and electrodes of the electrocardiograph enveloped and constricted me, forcing me to confront my genetic fate. This series of self-portraits, of delicate collodion emulsion on glass and aluminum, is a meditation on that fate and seeks to capture that moment of morbid epiphany and the feeling of absolute fragility which accompanied that realization.

Taipa Village Art Space is honoured to invite Luso-American photographic artist Hugo Teixeirato showcase his unique collection of documentary photography featuring an iconographic Macau fixture – bamboo scaffolding on construction sites, which is ubiquitous in the city as it undergoes rapid development.   The construction workers (bamboo masters) are acting like spiders, taking a risky job with courage to wrap the vertiginous towers with bamboo scaffoldings which look like spider webs. (Cyanotypes exhibited at Taipa Village Art Space, 2017.)

Gelatin Silver prints in hand bound book, 2002.