Project Statement:
Espejismo (Working Title)
My thesis project is an animated installation that attempts to imagine the creation and end of reality as a subjective experience. Born as a reaction to racial reckoning and public health crisis, this project serves as a means through which I could try to make sense of the unjust reality we live in.
Through abstract animation, heavily manipulated footage from my phone, and droning sounds, I carefully constructed an imaginary representation of subjectivity as a universe of its own. Inspired by the works of abstract artists and animators such as Norman McLarren, Robert Breer, Roberto Matta, and Jesús Rafael Soto, this piece aims to challenge the audience’s expectations from art and push them to find new ways to interpret and appreciate it.
My process was heavily influenced by my relationship to the tools I used, the images I chose to include and transform, and my general views on life and art. Influenced by philosophical movements such as nihilism and absurdism, the reality I present in this piece might come off as pessimistic, but it still leaves room for beauty and the search for meaning.
The title is a Spanish word that translates to “Mirage”, and it’s meant to allude to subjective experience and the illusion of reality that comes with it. My goal with this piece is to present the audience with this illusion, and encourage them to find their own meaning to it.
The meaning that the piece has to me is informed by my own personal experience and perceptions, so the audience will never know exactly what goes behind every detail. But that is inevitably the case when you get a peek into someone else’s reality, there is no possible way to understand it entirely from such a small glimpse. Instead, the audience is invited to fill in the blanks with their own imagination and perception, to create their own illusion. Ambiguity is encouraged as a tool to bring out the nuances of each spectator’s point of view.
Artist Statement:
Using a playfully curious approach to visual and sonic aesthetics, my artistic practice attempts to make sense of reality as I perceive and understand it. Inspired by personal experiences and views on life, my work dives into the uncertainties that arise from day to day concerns. I’m not interested in making statements about contemporary issues, or searching for the meaning of life or any transcendental knowledge of sorts. Instead, my practice is about capturing the essence of feelings, and finding ways to express that which can not be put into words.
My process is often guided by an internal monologue in which right and wrong choices are in a continuous dance of sorts, until an aesthetic that feels the most truthful to the feelings I’m dealing with arises. The approach is the same for every piece I work on, but the time it takes to find the imagery I’m going for varies drastically between each project. No two projects are ever the same. With each new project comes a new challenge, and each new challenge pushes me to reinvent and rediscover ways in which my visual languages can be used to capture ideas.
With moving image work being my primary medium, I aim to bring to life alternate realities that previously existed only within my imagination. My approach to motion is often not to recreate movements from real life, but rather to explore the ways in which motion can be used to evoke raw feelings, and push the audience to find meaning beyond what their surface-level perceptions of an image sequence are. In my practice, sound is often an important key element to the pieces I create. Often alternating between working in harmony with the visuals presented and contrasting with them, sound is used to create a new layer of meaning through which my pieces can be interpreted. Through these mediums, I use my artistic practice to connect with myself, and in the process touch on universal feelings that everyone can relate to.
