Artist's Statement

Will Omar Valdes (W.O.V)’s work aims to explore the tensions between the lived experience of a Queer Latine Cuban-American Immigrant and the online space of social media. Their handmade paper paintings, installations and sculptures are heavily influenced by their upbringing in early 00’s Miami where they were surrounded by the largest Cuban-American community in the world. They use internet aesthetics, along with their heritage, to inform their material choices, color palettes and simplification of motifs. W.O.V explores taboo and queer subjects such as online sex work, internet pornography, fatphobia, camp, labor and excess while resituating their contexts within an intersectional latine domestic space. By depicting painted porn website screenshots, porn ads, intimate queer encounters, domestic spaces, and religious figures of worship they can create a kaleidoscopic imagined safe-space where the cuir Cuban domestic realm and the online realm merge and remain in-flux.