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 Abuelito, 2005 |
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| Size : 16 cm x 25 cm, (6,33" x 9,75")Mediums : Pen and ink on paper |
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| INFORMATION |
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My artistic self owes something to a background that includes years of travel, social activism, and moving between cities and countries. I did settle long enough, here and there, to nurture the wellspring of image and thought that fed, and continues to feed, my creative urge.
Travelling and living in varied cultural contexts helped articulate my intrinsic desire for radical social change, which ultimately found expression through mixing art with politics. That's when I decided to hone my skills at the Victoria College of Art, and take a small taste of Emily Carr School of Art and Design in Vancouver.
Always one to hack at borders and transgress what I perceive as untenable limits, I completed an apprenticeship tattooing, and began work on a graphic novel. I illustrated with the Beehive Design collective, collaborated with a political prisoner to create comics of life on the inside, and showed and published many other visual works. I continue to plot away.
Art, to me, has always meant experimentation, so, in turn, I've always experimented—with mixed media, with collage, photography, text, and with sculpture, found-art, drawing, and painting. In fact, freely jumping between mediums comes naturally. Yet, the abstraction of lived experience and everything it generates for my work does have a perfectly practical side too. My current pen and ink focus evolved initially from a need to reproduce it cheaply in order to share with a wider audience, and of course something as mundane as the need to pack lightly when travelling.
Since returning from South America, I have lived and worked in Vancouver with my partner and our 7-month old daughter.
In summary, I think that art needs to be vital and critical. I'm less interested in pretty pictures then I am in art's power to point fingers, even as it offers hands of guidance, and new ways of seeing.
My art, as of late, deals with the themes of destruction, colonisation, extinction, containment of spirit, and, ultimately, death. Some say it's dark. I like to think of it as transformative: for always there is a crack, a point of vulnerability, and from that weakness grows an insurrection, a possible break, a hope for a different way. |
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