F31-4
I try not to talk about that because they are all rather embarrassing. I grew up watching way too much MTV. My favorite art is kitschy tourist art and my favorite painter is the now famous calendar artist Jesus Helguera. When my best friend and I turned 30 this year, we decided to have a Quinceañera x 2. So I really got into Quinceañera party décor. I guess it was sort of like a performance piece. But I still have this random lace, and fake pink flowers and Quince statues hanging around. I usually have no patience for performance art, except for fluxus.
After you moved to Los Angeles and attended UCLA your work moved between painting, video and installation mediums, are you settling into one preferred medium now?
I’ve always been very stubborn about my art practice and when I felt people where trying to push me to one medium I would head toward the other. At UCLA I felt like everyone wanted to do painting and in all the studios there were tons of paintings. So I did a lot of sculptural video, installation classes and really got into that. At the time though, I think that the video and installation work at UCLA got me into graduate school at CalArts. At CalArts I felt there was this underlying sentiment that painting was a dead medium and there was nothing new to offer to it. CalArts, or maybe just the other students that went there, were really into this modernist notion of art being this linear concept based on the “new”. Therefore if you aren’t doing anything obviously innovative, physically speaking then you are irrelevant. I think most mainstream art worlds operate on this level as well. It is just like fashion. I happen to agree to a certain extent with some of it but I also believe no two people can ever do the exact same piece of art just by virtue of their own intention and their own personal experience and relationship to it. A friend and I were talking about this the other day and how instead of using the word “post” we should be using “proto” because art movements aren’t linear and nothing ever really dies, it just becomes reborn, reinterpreted, etc… In terms of choosing a specific medium I tend to think the medium should inform the work. So I am sure I will always fluctuate between them. I do tend to gravitate to drawing though.
After you moved to Los Angeles and attended UCLA your work moved between painting, video and installation mediums, are you settling into one preferred medium now?
I’ve always been very stubborn about my art practice and when I felt people where trying to push me to one medium I would head toward the other. At UCLA I felt like everyone wanted to do painting and in all the studios there were tons of paintings. So I did a lot of sculptural video, installation classes and really got into that. At the time though, I think that the video and installation work at UCLA got me into graduate school at CalArts. At CalArts I felt there was this underlying sentiment that painting was a dead medium and there was nothing new to offer to it. CalArts, or maybe just the other students that went there, were really into this modernist notion of art being this linear concept based on the “new”. Therefore if you aren’t doing anything obviously innovative, physically speaking then you are irrelevant. I think most mainstream art worlds operate on this level as well. It is just like fashion. I happen to agree to a certain extent with some of it but I also believe no two people can ever do the exact same piece of art just by virtue of their own intention and their own personal experience and relationship to it. A friend and I were talking about this the other day and how instead of using the word “post” we should be using “proto” because art movements aren’t linear and nothing ever really dies, it just becomes reborn, reinterpreted, etc… In terms of choosing a specific medium I tend to think the medium should inform the work. So I am sure I will always fluctuate between them. I do tend to gravitate to drawing though.