MIRACLE OF BEING (2025 - Ongoing)
Miracle of Being is an expanded photographic and performance series that maps the thresholds between the sacred, the paranormal, and the racialized body. The project asks: What becomes possible when a trans-feminine body becomes the vessel through which multiple spiritual lineages speak?
The series is informed by my study of Hemi-Sync tapes, the Monroe Institute, Gnostic cosmology, and the Ra Material’s framework of energy centers. These esoteric systems gave me a language for understanding something I already knew in my body: that the photograph can function as a frequency device, a method for opening and stabilizing altered states of consciousness. Each portrait becomes a tuning fork for what Ra would call “gateway activation”—the moment when the self becomes permeable to higher-density intelligences.
For example, The Virgin of the Rose Tub image—a portrait of myself submerged in a bath of roses—references both Marian iconography and Indigenous water-ritual lineages. The image is less a photograph than a visitation. It enacts an apparition that is not Christian, not Indigenous, but something hybrid, fugitive, and insurgent: a trans Marian emissary whose body becomes a threshold between the solid and the liquid.
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Moving through Richmond’s racialized landscapes, the project engages with sites charged by violence, spectacle, and myth. This culminated in the alligator photographs at the Jefferson Hotel, where an alligator—long a Mesoamerican mythic guardian—has been converted into a racist spectacle for white visitors. By placing my body in proximity to the taxidermied creature, Miracle of Being reclaims the alligator as an Indigenous portal-being: a guardian of the underworld, a symbol of water, death, and cosmic rebirth. The photographs perform a quiet exorcism, reversing the racial baiting embedded in the hotel’s colonial architecture.
Throughout the series, I treat the camera as a ritual instrument—a device for stabilizing encounters with the paranormal and ancestral. The portraits are not staged; they are transmissions. Each work attempts to capture the moment when the body becomes an antenna: when the self dissolves and another intelligence speaks through gesture, light, or gaze. This is where the project turns political: the trans-latinx body is no longer the object of the lens, but the activated portal through which the sacred returns.
Ultimately, Miracle of Being proposes that spiritual experience is not separate from racial, gendered, or historical trauma. Instead, the miracle occurs within the body that has survived them. The project welcomes the supernatural, the ancestral, and the extraterrestrial as collaborators, and asks viewers to recognize the photograph not as a record but as an apparition, a rite, and a threshold of becoming.
