Samantha Alanna Wittwer interviews painter Anna Valdez about her work.

Valdez comments: "I think people are products of their environments. What you tend to surround yourself with can become who you are, but it’s also the people you’re interacting with and the things that you’re experiencing. It’s all sort of a back and forth, not a one way street. So I definitely believe that my still lifes function as self-portraits. In archeology you reconstruct history from the little pieces of garbage from peoples lives. You’re making a story about who they were, based off of their objects, their remnants the things they made and the things they left behind. That knowledge stays with me in everything I do. It makes sense to me – the objects that I surround myself with and the things that I’m interested in are the story that gets left behind to represent me. To put a face to something can isolate it, it becomes so specific. It’s a language, of symbols and motifs where people can form their own connections."