new people and things to research

• Hal Foster
• James Clifford
• Chris Rodrigues & Geoff Cox
  

mmmm art and anthropology . . .

Writings about my current/future work

In my studio practice, I draw upon methods of autobiographical story telling, personal narratives, and emotions evoked via these stories. I process the records of events and emotions through various digital and traditional media. I then articulate what I have generated through photography, text, and video. I do not classify myself as a video artist because my process requires that I work in many media simultaneously. Recently I am relying more on fieldwork and archival research as a means to gain material to produce bodies of work. Family structure, oral history, and identity shape my work. With my academic interests in anthropology and language, I plan to push the connection that contemporary art and these fields can encompass. Propelled by my recent experiences and discoveries, my work has taken on a deeper personal significance. I have been intermingling language and mixing up metaphors; I am searching for a new and distinct understanding of the concepts I juxtapose. With an ethereal and uniquely narrative quality, my video works offer allegorical imagery. My thesis show will encompass video portraits of emotions and roles that members of both of my nuclear families have held and currently hold. I am also generating books of constructed and imaginary family histories, using my own lineages as vehicles.

walmart friday night 6 - 7.30pm

• mother talks on cell phone. tells, presumably father, that they will be home soon. daughter continues to look at more merchandise. she is happy with herself and her new pair of glasses. she trots off following her mother.
• pregnant mother totes a cart behind her. son of 6 or 7 hangs on the front of the cart, swinging his body back and forth causing the cart to go crooked.
• 2 brothers, 9 and 11, have just got new packs of gum. they try to open them. the older one dances while he is opening it. he saunters on ahead.
• the 7 year old has a very indignant look on his face as he carries his toy away from the register. his father calls after him, 'Hey, Dylan,' rather quietly. if the son heard his father, he has ignored him and continues to walk farther away from the register and turns right towards the exit.
• Even the four year old son has the same posture and walk of his father who must look older than he is with a son so young.
• the 13 year old gangly granddaughter bought a small gift for her grandmother, who is accompanied her. the girl hands the plastic grocery bag off to her grandmother and says 'Here.' The grandmother accepts it with a small grin.
• the middle-aged woman and her mother leave the store. the daughter is pushing the cart filled to the top. You can see how the middle-aged woman will look in 20 years. her face will mirror her mother's face now.
• the four year old brother and six year old sister dance and play on the floor. clapping their hands. the brother looses his balance and falls, but catches himself with both hands flat on the floor. his sister ignores him and twirls around.
• the older couple must look older than they are. her arm is locked in his, as if they were walking down the aisle again. they slowly waddle to the exit speaking softly to one another.
  

Paper

Por Fin (Finally)!!
I found the paper for the 'Milwaukee after coming to Milwaukee from California' prints online!
I don't know when the paper will be here, because the books are coming from Spain through DHL ground, but hopefully in a week or so. I want to Chine-Colé the prints I have now to test the process and see if that is what these prints need - perhaps there is a different way to display and mount them . . .
www.miquelruis.com

identity

Beyond/In Western NY. went to that on friday - well the venues in buffalo.
there were two artists that really struck me - and for very different reasons.
Wilka Roig. she was at CEPA. here is a diptychs from the series Traced:
so works with identity. and i guess for her placing herself in the same pose, in the same room, at almost the same time identifies herself with her subject !?! just because she is in a similar pose in the same place and made her image black and white - does that really talk about identity? i feel like the whole thing is false. maybe that is what she is trying to show. but i doubt it. either way it doesn't feel like she is pushing it in the direction that she is working. my advisors keep talking to me about 'intentionality' and i feel that that is what she is lacking. even her choice of costume. it doesn't say anything. this could be an outfit that she has in her closet. what if she were to wear their clothes? that could be interesting. and really 'trace' them . . . well, the one thing is did was push me to think about how she is addressing identity. and i realized that in some of the photographs with women, i thought that they might have been related to her - when only a couple actually seemed to be by the choice of titles. so, i started thinking about identifying facial characteristics. that is something that most people use to identify one from another. no divulging more just yet. i need to make something first.
oooooh. and the other: Simone Mantellassi.
unfortunately i couldn't find any images of his work online. a pity. you should go to the albright-knox and check it out though. an installation of tons of frames drawings and writings. most rather cartoonish, each smart and witty. some just beautiful to look at. i'm not quite sure why i was so attracted to his work - no i take that back I AM SURE, but i can't quite verbalize it just yet.

Appropriation and such

I was thinking about hybridity and appropriation. how hybridity is really just appropriating from two or more sources. and overlaying them or superimposing them integrating them. what gets thrown away and what becomes a part of the new hybrid identity? and what is the value of what was thrown away? was it thrown away because it is only useful in its original form, before the hybrid existed or does it/can it become a part of a different hybrid and what are the criteria for that?
i guess it is just survival of the fittest, right?
i want to believe that there is some choosing happening. that i, myself, as a hybrid and actively choosing what i want to identify with. how i self identify. how i create and mold my own identity.
i could choose to not identify as a hybrid and just be a normal person. not focus on being adopted and the new family i have (meaning both of them together as one, as mine).
i mean, everyone is a hybrid or multiple or plural.
ok, more reading.

Synthetic Artifacts

Thesis Statement:
Using my personal hybrid identity (as adoptee and Mexican American) and the residual effects of memory and re-memory, I will investigate identity within the constructs of family structure and family history. Creating fragments and compiling existing fragments, which contribute to self identity, I will explore the negotiation of identity and imagined identity and its place in the family narrative, the real, imagined, and constructed family narrative.

Research

• Claude Leví-Strauss
• Napolean Chagnon
• Performing Hybridity, May Joseph ed.
• Dan Kwong - performances at Highway
• Residue . Memory/Re-memory . Palimpsest . Fragment . Constructed . Imagined . Reclamation