To first understand the context in which the work exists, let’s start with the basics.

[Southern] Gothic is an exceptional tool to encourage conversation around hard to discuss social issues. It is complex and intersectional, shapeshifting under a variety of lenses, to which the artist or author exploring the genre contributes by bringing their own personal experience of the world to the table.

That considered, I’ll begin by telling you a little bit about my own “coming of age”, highlighting my personal perspective around typical Southern Gothic themes of race, sexuality, family dynamic, religion, and gender constructs.

I was born in Santa Clara, CA in the mid-eighties to a white mother and Hispanic father, who separated when I was two. This prompted an upbringing where I spent the majority of the year in Austin, TX with my mother, stepfather and three half/step-siblings, and summers in Pasadena, CA with my father and stepmother. My childhood was a loving one, and my parents were all exceptionally supportive of my interests in competitive sports, art, and theatre, but the two households were quite different.

When I was young, around 4-6, still living in the Silicon Valley area, I would accompany my mother going door to door, pitching her house cleaning/daycare business to our neighbors. She had dropped out of high school to be a mother, which was hard for her because she had dreams of becoming a doctor, but she sacrificed all of that to be there for us. After we moved to Austin, I watched her work hard to get her GED and eventually graduate from UT’s School of Nursing, which inspired in me an incredible degree of respect and admiration. My mother is one of the strongest, kindest, most nurturing woman I’ve met, and I’m grateful to have learned deep empathy and acceptance of all people simply by hanging onto her apron strings. We come from a long line of strong, salt of the earth kind of women, originating in Slovakia up until my great grandmother moved to the states to escape an arranged marriage, but that’s a story for another time.

Overall, growing up in Austin in the 90s was both progressive, yet very “good ol’ boy”.

Some would argue Texas is its own flavor of “Southern”…more “Southwest” than “Deep South”, which is decidedly different, but they share a lot of the same genetic makeup. What I can attest to is it is full of strong, kind women, many of which were my teachers and mentors, and they are honestly the best part about the area for me (aside from the food). Hands down. They taught me how to be independent but caring, and that I should never take shit from anybody sitting down. But Austin was always speaking out of two sides of its mouth. Although it was a blue little dot in a sea of red, there existed a plethora of outdated social norms simmering below the surface, all of which were painted over with loud, bright colors and drowned out with feel good nights of live music and queso. But they existed.

My father is a second generation immigrant from Spain, and that side of my family lived in an area of Los Angeles that was high-density Hispanic/Latinx, and quite poor. Like my mother, he put himself through school (after his very violent stint in Viet Nam), worked for fun 80s companies like Mattel and Atari, invented the “Safety Syringe”, and eventually became a wealth manager for the rich folks of Pasadena. Given his own background, his relationship with success and money were quite different than that of my white parents’, and I learned how much harder it was for POC to climb out of poverty (and the impacted relationships with family in light of it) by watching him. Having his mentorship as I found my own struggles being a woman in tech (and in general) I consider to be one of the greatest gifts in my life.

It’s important to note that I look much more like my mother (who is very fair and very blonde) than my father (who has a very dark complexion), which thrust me into the “not brown enough” struggle in some interesting ways.

My father’s side of the family has always been kind to me, but I would often walk into hushed conversation where my grandparents’ friends would be openly questioning my mother’s purity and fidelity (usually with the strong “W” word, so not very kindly) because I was the very different looking duckling of the bunch. Starting from the age of about seven, I began loudly addressing my father as “Dad” in the company of strangers, because they would regularly mistake my belonging to the whiter looking people in the room. Around 14 I had to increase my volume because people would (and still do) mistake us for lovers, which is honestly the most mortifying thing to deal with, I don’t recommend it. In middle school, I was regularly bullied by several Latinx kids I tried befriending, who didn’t believe my background, even after I brought photos of myself with my dad to try to prove it—they’d throw gum in my hair, threaten to beat me up, and demanded my last name “Perez” was fake, so I started going by my white stepfather’s last name of “Dodge” and stopped bringing up my Hispanic origin altogether. I simply didn’t feel like it belonged to me. I still have a fair bit of guilt around that, but it’s helped me understand how easy it is for white presenting people to just “opt out” of this brand of struggle if it becomes too much. I don’t imagine those kids were able to do so as easily as I could later in life, and though I experienced a fair bit of hurt and trauma, it’s simply not the same. Additionally, it taught me that we should never make assumptions about others’ struggles based on their looks alone, and that this a very intersectional topic. We’ve all got issues—some overlap, some might look like they overlap, but its not ever simple binary. It’s a complex space, and kindness and empathy is the only way to address it.

My relationship to religion is a layered one, and I won’t go too deeply into it, but I would consider myself somebody who is still recovering from religious trauma (not at the direct fault of my parents, more-so just the foundational, fear-based thinking embraced by most Christian orthodoxes).

When my parents moved us to Austin in ‘92, they got deep into Christianity, moving away from Catholicism to Southern Baptist (and eventually to non-denominational, which had the best donuts and music by far, but I digress). This prompted yet another baptism around the time I turned 12, which my mother asserts makes me “heavily insured”. With it came a revolving door of Southern church camps and youth groups, which seemed to care more about the cut of my bathing suit and the degree to which my legs were spread than my personal connection with God, but I became a Sunday school teacher in my teens anyway, and studied that Bible in earnest. My relationship with Christianity had a fairly abrupt end right around the time I joined one of these youth groups on a missionary trip the Dominican Republic, where I had several “ah-ha” white savior moments as we passed out candy and toothbrushes to scrambling children, and was turned down emphatically by the parents of a girl, who I’d assumed was living on the street, to pay for her schooling in full. That was an extremely embarrassing, humbling moment, and it really got me thinking about how I saw the world and the people in it.

As I was working these concepts out in my teenaged brain, trying to process my concerns with the group’s adult leaders, all they seemed to want to talk about was, yet again, the amount of skin I was showing in response to the Dominican heat over how appropriate it was for us to be dangling resources over the heads of these people to bait them into adopting our culture and religion. Quite ironically, I used that experience as my essay prompt to get into Texas Christian University, which is where I took a world religion class by a Nigerian professor that absolutely rocked my world, thus closing that door to Christianity forever. It was around that time I picked up the books “Ishmael” and “Story of B” by Daniel Quinn, “The Poisonwood Bible” by Barbara Kingsolver, and “A Passage to India” by E. M. Forster, and after that, my mind was firmly made up. I transferred to The University of Texas at Austin soon after and enjoyed a far more diverse and progressive education, majoring in Psychology & Theatre Design (which I honestly didn’t know where the hell that would take me, but luckily discovered UX Design and currently find myself flourishing as a digital Product Designer, thank god).

My relationship to my sexuality is nuanced, like most of us, but I consider myself to be a Bi woman in a heteronormative marriage.

I empathize deeply with the LGBTQA+ community, particularly those who currently live in small towns and/or have “escaped” to more progressive areas. I haven’t personally experienced violence or trauma as a response to my sexuality, but am friends with those who have. I feel that this is an important aspect of myself to note.

Those are the most pertinent things to reveal about my background, and where I’m coming from in relationship to

So what inspired me to start building this house?

I currently live in San Francisco, and now that I’ve had a little bit of space between myself and my Southern upbringing, I’m keen to start exploring some of the issues I’ve seen and heard firsthand, particularly around race, gender constructs, class, sexuality and small town politics.

I started doing a lot of introspection recently in the face of our recent Trump regime, because I, like many other people in the US, have seen how easy it is for these right-leaning ideologies that feed off of hate and intolerance to come to the surface when leadership appears to lean in that direction.

The house itself is designed to reflect all of these things from books and history, themes and tropes... The library is the heart of the house, and based in higher realism than the rest of the rooms as if the author is writing her world around her (Flannery O’Connor and Shirley Jackson being two strong female writers I’m drawing from, and depicted in the library’s focal portrait). For example, the bedroom will be plucked from A Rose for Emily exactly as described (bed corpse included), the kitchen will be filling with sand-like in Michael McDowell’s The Elementals, and there will be lots of hidden ghosts and bodies behind mirrors and under floorboards. By the end of the project, I hope to represent hundreds of details, coupled with solid references so the viewer can rabbit hole for hours into why things were designed the way they were.