Jeohsua Palma / VLAD

Work

Selected work

These photographs and films come from places I have walked, worked, and carried. A place reveals itself slowly. Someone else may recognize in it a thing I could never have named.

Original photographs and moving images, shown with proposed interpretive titles. Their archival titles remain visible. These readings offer questions, never fixed meanings.

Artist catalogue

The work continues beyond this selection.

Explore my artist profile and a wider catalogue of work on MarkMy.art. The images here are an invitation to look closer, while the catalogue offers another way to follow the work as it grows.

Explore the catalogue

Route

Three grounds, one way of seeing

Place is a method. Nezahualcóyotl, Astoria, and Los Angeles.

Uto-Aztecan branches

Numic
Takic
Hopi
Tubatulabal
Tepiman
Opatan
Tarahumaran
Cahita
Corachol
Nahuan

Documented ranges of a language family. Numic, Takic, Hopi, and Tubatulabal are Northern. The others are Southern. Not national borders, and not a claim of land or authority.

Based in Los Angeles, CA

Nezahualcóyotl

Street intelligence, survival, poetry, labor, the memory of a family, and the bright force of the urban edge.

Astoria

Bridges, the waterfront, trains, neighbors, the residue of industry, and photography as a daily witness.

Los Angeles

Distance, the basin, the rivers, construction, migration, the languages of Southern California, and a cinematic way of relation.

Hollywood Hills

Los Angeles, CA

34°08′N 118°19′W

Based in Los Angeles, CA

Hell Gate Bridge

Astoria, New York

40°47′N 73°55′W

El Coyote de Neza

Nezahualcóyotl

19°24′N 99°01′W

Practice

A spiritual practice, made visible in photography and film.

Based in Los Angeles

In practice

Jeohsua Palma, also known as VLAD, is a Chicano artist, photographer, and filmmaker based in Los Angeles. His practice treats remembrance as a spiritual art, drawn from ancestral memory, meditation, and the hidden systems of everyday life. Years in plumbing and construction taught him to follow water, pressure, and repair, the things that move out of sight. The images ask what belonging becomes when memory is allowed to return.

The Earth remembers what we were taught to forget. I meet that memory in moving water, in the names of places, in stories a family will not surrender, and in the quiet around histories that never reached us.

A worthy future looks backward with care. Living knowledge stays with the people who carry it. Science, spirit, and the tools we build belong in one conversation, held with reverence.

Third Place, Citywide Graphic Arts Competition, 2018, Digital Photography

@jeohsua

Trace

Photographs, the old names of places, dreams, and the mark a repair leaves in the wall.

Flow

Water under the plaster, migration, speech, and movement across older ground.

Rupture

Colonization, displacement, languages pushed into silence, and what refuses to die.

Relation

Living communities, ancestral memory, and the art of letting difference remain itself.

Return

Remembrance as care, and a return to the world with clearer eyes.

Statement

The alchemy of remembrance

Nezahualcóyotl, Astoria, Los Angeles

I make art to live nearer the sacred, not to stand outside it and explain.

The Earth remembers what humanity was taught to forget. I feel it in the travel of water, in the old names of places, in the stories a family keeps close, and in the long quiet around histories we were never given. My practice begins there. Listening is the first devotion.

I am a Chicano artist. Photography, film, and the materials of ordinary life are my instruments. Years in plumbing and construction taught me to read what a wall conceals. Water moves where no one is looking. Pressure gathers in the dark. A hairline fracture can confess an entire system. That way of seeing followed me into the street and into the frame. The visible image is only the surface of the story.

I return to Aztlán and the Codex Boturini because they carry movement, belonging, and memory along one painted path. The Mexica migration asks me to imagine the land before the border, and the stories that crossed it on foot. Where Aztlán rests on a modern map remains an open argument in the record. Kinship among Uto-Aztecan languages deepens the path and leaves each nation its own people. Mazatec belongs to the Oto-Manguean family, with histories of its own. I study Mazatec and Wixárika knowledge in the language those communities already speak.

Colonization redrew more than a map. It broke languages, interrupted ceremonies, and tried to decide what would count as knowledge. Indigenous knowledge did not vanish. People kept it alive, in bodies, in song, in the privacy of a house. To remember well is to recognize the ones who still carry it, and to leave sacred things in the hands that know them.

Meditation, prayer, dreams, and what I receive as divine guidance give this search an inner life. Altered perception can open a question, whether the door is silence or the long history of medicines such as cannabis, peyote, and sacred mushrooms. Wisdom lives in the relationship, in the intention, and in the care that follows.

Wirikuta holds me. For the Wixárika, sacred land, pilgrimage, and hikuri are one life, not scenery for someone else's revelation. María Sabina, Mazatec curandera of Huautla de Jiménez, opens another door: ceremony, sacred mushrooms, song, and service, bound together. Her life also shows the wound that opens when outsiders turn a living knowledge into spectacle. Each tradition keeps its tongue, its history, and its own custodians.

An image sometimes arrives before I have a name for it. A dream, an intuition, a shard of memory, a moment of prayer. That is where a photograph or a film begins. I call it channeling because it is listening, a hospitality offered to what wants to be seen. Making, for me, is spiritual alchemy. Grief becomes attention. An inherited silence becomes a conversation. Separation becomes the chance to care.

A work of art can open a room where recognition begins, and where people practice care in one another's presence. I am looking for a renaissance rooted in remembrance, where science, spirit, and technology meet as guests, not as rivals for the last word.

This work is an invitation to see past the histories and the pictures we were handed. Across Gaia, people have found meaning in land, in dreams, in medicine, and in the memory of the ancestors, and each tradition tells the story in its own voice. The systems that arrange our digital attention can narrow a life as surely as they connect one. I carry that concern into photography and film. Look through your own histories, your beliefs, your doubts, your days. Ask whose knowledge is sheltered, whose has been pushed out of the light, and what still waits outside the frame.

Jeohsua "VLAD" Palma

“balance the scales of honesty, of justice, of values”

Manly P. Hall, Searching for Values in 1978, PRS Journal, Spring 1978, page 2. This sentence is from that editorial. It is not from the 1971 pamphlet, which I have not read.The quotation is kept in the published English of its translator or author. It is not offered as a new translation.

Descent, responsibility, and return

What do we carry back into the light?

Mictlan and Dante's poem belong to different traditions. Their differences make the questions more necessary, not less.

In Nahua traditions, Mictlan names a destination and journey of the dead. It is not a court where the wicked are sent for punishment. Dante's Divine Comedy, shaped by medieval Christianity, confronts moral choice, consequence, repentance, and the possibility of transformation. I do not treat these visions as interchangeable.

Yet reading them beside one another asks me what a journey through darkness can reveal about the living. What happens when we encounter the suffering our choices have helped create? What histories must we examine before we repeat them? A passage toward greater consciousness means little to me unless it changes how we care for one another.

I imagine collective healing not as an escape from responsibility but as its deeper form. We inherit unfinished histories. We can also choose to interrupt their harm. That is the future I want for Gaia, the living Earth, and for the people who share it.

Questions to carry with you

Which inherited patterns are we still repeating without noticing?
Whose experiences have been left outside the histories we trust?
What would it mean to face our failures without surrendering the possibility of change?
What responsibility follows a moment of spiritual insight?
What kind of world would our descendants recognize as an act of care?

This is a personal comparison, not a claim of shared doctrine. Mictlan should be read through sources attentive to Nahua histories and living Indigenous perspectives. The Divine Comedy belongs to its medieval Italian Christian and literary context. Dante's Plutus, in Inferno VII, is not the planet Pluto.

Proposed reading

Many paths, one responsibility

I believe collective healing becomes possible when we stop treating difference as a threat to understanding. I do not ask every belief to become mine. I ask what it would mean to approach a stranger's relationship with the sacred as something worth listening to, without claiming access to what was never offered to me.

Omnism speaks to this discipline of openness. I recognize that different spiritual traditions may carry different forms of wisdom, even when they disagree. That does not give me the right to collapse their histories or borrow their sacred practices. To believe in connection is also to honor distance, consent, and what I cannot know.

I have seen how easily a society mistakes its categories for the limits of reality. I am drawn to the unseen not because every mystery confirms my beliefs, but because a mystery can change the quality of my attention. Synchronicity and spiritual experience enter my practice as encounters that ask for reflection. They are not shortcuts around history or evidence.

For me, healing becomes collective when attention changes our behavior. It asks us to recognize inherited harm, to correct what we repeat, and to make space for people whose knowledge was dismissed or taken. I want art to hold that difficult possibility: a meeting between spiritual conviction, intellectual honesty, and the work of repair.

Mictlan and the maps of the unseen

I return to Mictlan because it asks me to think about passage, loss, and the presence of ancestors. The Nahua underworld is not simply a Mexican version of a Christian hell. It has its own histories and cosmological meanings. Setting its surviving images beside European maps of hell is useful precisely because they are different. Comparison can expose the beliefs carried by the person who drew the map.

The maps themselves have histories. Colonial-era manuscripts preserved indispensable Nahua knowledge, but they also show the conditions under which it was translated and interpreted. Recent scholars have questioned whether familiar vertically stacked diagrams of the cosmos were shaped by European cosmological concepts. Rather than treating one diagram as timeless certainty, I want to ask whose understanding it records and what may have been altered on the way to us.

My reading of descent as a journey toward inner knowledge belongs to my own spiritual practice. I do not claim it as the single meaning of Mictlan, or as an inherited initiation. For me, the dark is not evidence that divinity is absent. It is a reminder to look carefully at what I carry into it.

“Thence we came forth to rebehold the stars.”

Dante Alighieri, Inferno, Canto XXXIV, final line. English translation by H. W. Longfellow.The quotation is kept in the published English of its translator or author. It is not offered as a new translation.

Pluto in Libra, and the practice of correction

At the Philosophical Research Society, Manly P. Hall's Pluto in Libra: An Interpretation stands as a historical example of interpreting the relationship between planetary symbolism and collective life. The Society's catalog identifies it as a pamphlet transcribed from a lecture, published in 1971, interpreting the 1970s and 1980s. I have not read the pamphlet, so this page does not quote it or repeat its arguments.

In my own language, Pluto suggests transformation and Libra suggests relationship, proportion, and balance. I use those symbols to interrogate patterns of domination and response, not to assert that astrology has scientifically caused events. If history repeats a wound, the task is not to admire the pattern. It is to identify it, interrupt it, and practice repair. The spiritual renaissance I imagine has to change how we treat one another.

Philosophical Research Society, Pluto in Libra: An Interpretation, 1971

Science, technology, and spirit

I want a relationship between science, technology, and spirituality that can survive correction. Science can test claims about the material world. Living spiritual traditions carry experiences, obligations, and forms of relationship that cannot be reduced to a single experiment. Technology can help preserve what communities choose to share, or it can strip knowledge of its people and context. The ethical choice is not abstract. We make it in how we listen, cite, build, ask permission, and live.

I am committed to an awakening grounded in connection rather than superiority. I believe our divinity is worth asking about. I am also willing to say when I do not know. These two commitments do not weaken one another. They keep the door open.

“The Love which moves the sun and the other stars.”

Dante Alighieri, Paradiso, Canto XXXIII, final line. English translation by H. W. Longfellow.The quotation is kept in the published English of its translator or author. It is not offered as a new translation.

Research

Land, living knowledge, and what stays open

History, language, and spirit, each kept in the place it belongs.

Aztlán and the painted journey

Aztlán lives in the Mexica story of migration as a place of origin and of belonging. The Codex Boturini carries that walk in footprints and in the names of places. I return to it as memory. Where it would sit on a modern map remains an open argument in the record.

Living

Wirikuta and the other paths

I am moved by the Wixárika relation to Wirikuta, where sacred land, pilgrimage, and hikuri belong to the life of the community. Peyote, sacred mushrooms, cannabis, and today's talk of the Sonoran Desert toad each walk their own history. Modern use of Bufo has no documented line back to a precolonial Mexica or Wixárika rite.

Inquiry

Stories that stay with their tellers

The stories around Pachita, and Jacobo Grinberg's syntergic theory, widen the field of what I am willing to consider. They remain testimony, and a proposal offered in good faith. The Philosophical Research Society is an archive of symbols and of mysticism. Living teachers remain with their communities.