Looking to Du Bois' notion of a "vast veil," one senses that slipping in between the obvious and the overlooked implications of such a term, lies an inarticulate difference whose presence, though cited in numerous texts, continues to remain as little more than a marker of the Other -- the disenfranchised. More than just a cultural or economic signpost, his concept of the veil proved itself to be essential to writers and activists throughout the civil rights movement, and though never strictly defined, Du Bois seems to have conceived of his veil as emblematic signifier of social inequity.

As a Latino artist living in Southern California, I began to imagine the inversion of this veiled space within my own work. If for Du Bois the veil was a semi-penetrable barrier and ghostly marker of difference, then this body of work seeks to materialize the veil. Digital technology allows the photographic document, or index, to be penetrated, and transgressed. Whether photographically captured or scanned without a camera, each of these digital images presents human skin as the playing field upon which to transform difference into sameness. Initially all the skin was my own, however increasingly I have begun to combine, graft, or simply include it with the skin of other models. Found through the public listings and word of mouth, Latinos, gay men, European women, young women, have all found their way before my lens.

In the main set of images one sees several examples of dermatological studies, each presenting dermatology as a schematic trope or marker of the "veil" within the work as a whole. The play of technology in this new body of work is an unapologetic, if discrete, and one sees images of skin transformed by illness, the threat of AIDS, old age, combined with my own drawings, fragmenting my own subjectivity with each blemish, scar and line.