Studio Wall
Studies.

A wall lined with 36×72 inch sheet metal panels, covered with wheatpasted prints from earlier zine prototypes — accumulation and reuse rather than clean display. An archive under pressure.

Over time, the surface became a thematic collage assembled from different bodies of work: morning rituals in Varanasi, protest photographs from Mexico City, Día de los Muertos across three cities, street documentation from San Francisco and Oakland. Because the wall remains magnetic, it also functions as a live mounting system — finished works, cyanotypes, screen prints, and inkjet prints can be placed over the pasted surface without closing it. Each arrangement becomes a temporary intervention into an already active surface.

The videos on this page document those temporary states before the wall shifts again. The work is the system of rotation.

The base layer is built from prints made during the Morning Rituals series in Varanasi — the ghats at dawn, street encounters, the river. Wheatpasted directly onto the metal, the prints begin to behave less like individual photographs and more like visual sediment: documentary material after circulation and reuse.

Mounted over the surface: a cyanotype printed on a handkerchief, two prints on paper torn from a pamphlet acquired at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in Old Delhi, and archival inkjet prints on vellum. The Ashram pamphlet connects to work made across the same India chapter — the same source material moving through different substrates.

The base layer is protest photography from Mexico City — demonstrations, bodies in the street, the visual grammar of public dissent. Wheatpasted, the images lose their individual context and become a collective surface: the wall as an account of organized refusal.

Mounted over it: photographs from Oakland and California, photographs from Puerto Rico, a cyanotype sample with studio notes, a cyanotype from the Folsom Street Fair, and inkjet prints on archival photo paper. Geographies and social registers collide on the same surface — the studio as a place where these materials can be held in relation.

The base layer is the Varanasi wall in transition — the same wheatpasted surface, now intervened with stucco, acrylic paint, and oil markers. The original photographic layer is still present underneath, partially obscured, worn further into the metal. The wall accumulates rather than resets.

Mounted over the painted surface: inkjet prints on archival photo paper from Reclaiming Home — fathers of color photographed with their children, alongside cityscapes. The series was shown at the Vallejo Naval and Historical Museum in September 2024. On the studio wall, the portraits become a temporary installation on a surface that has already held Varanasi, already been marked and re-marked.

This configuration is base layer only — no mounted works, no second register. The surface is built entirely from photographs made during Día de los Muertos across three sites: Mexico City, San Andrés Mixquic, and Oaxaca. Ceremony, altars, marigolds, the density of public mourning as visual event.

Wheatpasted directly onto the metal, the photographs from three different cities and ritual contexts collapse into a single continuous surface. The wall holds the geography of the dead without organizing it.

The base layer is the same Día de los Muertos surface — Mexico City, San Andrés Mixquic, Oaxaca — now carrying a second register of installation. Mounted over the ceremonial ground: a hand-colored screen print and three cyanotypes on cotton fabric from the Los Olvidados Guatemala series.

Two of the cyanotypes are layered on top of each other, image compounding image. The third stands alone, toned with grana cochinilla — the same cochineal dye extracted by colonial powers from the communities Castro documents, brought back into the print as visual restitution. The wall holds Día de los Muertos and Guatemala simultaneously, ceremony and displacement occupying the same surface.