Assistant Professor
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Fine Art Program
arauz@queensu.ca
Biography
My practice examines the technical, political, and conceptual dimensions of printmaking through the lens of diasporic identity, focusing particularly on the Latin American Diaspora in Canada. Working across traditional and expanded forms, I engage print as a medium of embodiment, transformation, and social engagement. My work scrutinizes how printmaking’s processes - transfers, pressure, impact, exposure, substrate - operate both as physical actions and as metaphors for displacement, adaptation, and re-rooting.
In this context, I treat print as more than technical processes; it becomes site for iterative meaning-making and layered surfaces that reflect the conditions of migration, belonging, and cultural transformation. To expand the lineage of mark-making and meaning-making, I mine video excerpts from site-specific performances, photographic sittings, digital media, and completed compositions. These time-based captures are recontextualized within print processes, allowing images and gestures to migrate across mediums and echo the layered visual and cultural vocabularies of diaspora. Considering print in this way serves as a framework to understand how diasporic identities could be perceived - an accumulations of experience, culture, and survival. I refer to this hybrid methodology as mediated methods and print performance, approaches that merge embodied action, technical process, and time-based media. In this framework, the body, the plate, the substrate, and the press coalesce into a site for action, transformation, and re-documentation. Mediated methods draw on video, photography, and digital imaging to activate print as a temporal and relational medium, while print performance emphasizes the gestural, durational, and material aspects of making - where the act of printing itself becomes a form of live inscription and spatial negotiation.
Working from questions is imporant to ground my work. Can a relief print "pass" as a scan or photograph? What does it mean for an analog process to perform digitally mediated identities? These provocations extend into my lithographs, large-scale laser-engraved relief works and community collaborations, which fuse traditional print aesthetics with digital scanning to explore questions of assimilation, scrutiny, and technical translation.
Community-based collaboration is central to my practice. Projects such as Choir Chant and Tracing Kingston’s Solidarities invite participants into the printshop environment where collective knowledge, affective memory, and visual culture are developed through hands-on processes. These initiatives frame the print studio as a social space, one where intergenerational, intercultural, and interdisciplinary dialogues. Here, print functions as both a tool an site for storytelling and a platform to knowledge sharing/dessimination.
Print has skin in the game. It is used to surveil and legitimize bodies. Its materials - paper, ink, plates, and machinery - are bound to the production of passports and identification documents used to validate bodies. Working through print means engaging with its latent politics: the fear and implications of counterfeits, and the desire for legitimacy.
I position printmaking as a diasporic medium, its iterative nature, material migrations, and historical ties to identification and surveillance mirror the layered complexities of diasporic life. To print is to pass, to endure, and to adapt. It is a process of claiming space, pressing history into surface, and building shared meaning across borders.
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