Deep End Review, The Company
http://www.artslant.com/la/articles/show/9490
During the transitional period of post-Pinochet dictatorship, my family moved permanently from rural upstate New York to Viña del Mar, Chile. I was twelve. On my way to be outfitted for my first school uniform my eyes met the glares of armed police hanging out from the gaping black portholes of their armored tanks. The impact of this moment was indelible. The cultural shift created a tumultuous fusion of alienation and bridled fear within me, reflective of the Chilean people’s state of unease. Disoriented, having to learn Spanish and navigate a new environment, I felt that I belonged to no particular culture. For this, the illusion of “home” and the fabrication of desire inform my work both conceptually and formally.
Since moving to southern California, I have been particularly drawn to the alienating quality of the suburban landscape. I am interested in the fantasy of escape and how westward expansion has created sites of excess made to entice. Man’s desire to control and confine nature versus the desire to ‘return to nature’ creates formidable tension. Through a lens of female subjectivity I examine this desire for the landscape to be something it isn’t. In painting, video and other media I incorporate constructed narratives and imagined realities.
On October 21st I was hiking with my dog on the winding fire trails behind Magic Mountain. The path borders the “edge of nature”, where housing development has stopped (temporarily) and butts into open land of chaparral. Emerging stealthily, a pack of coyotes attacked me and dog. I finally escaped their stalking circle into the bright green of man’s scripted landscape—a golf course. This surreal experience had an uncanny resemblance to myth and fairytale. “Let’s call it, Valencia” is a reenactment in which I navigated the gray area between experience and representation, subjectivity and perception. I examined how memory is a function of interpretation while exploring the relationship between the authentic and the orchestrated. Vilem Flusser writes that we find ourselves in a period of expulsion, to survive we must take the chaos around us and interpret it as data—a conversion synonymous with creation. This act of conversion informs my art making practice.
Like Vilem Flusser, in Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, themes of time, space and memory are condensed into many structural, thematic and stylistic possibilities, due to the theory that art is produced from the transformation and synthesis of “experience” and “memory”. What is authentic then, since memory is subject to interpretation? In my practice, I enter the work that is incidental to experience, opening a personal microcosm into greater social and political themes. My next project entails unearthing an archive of a musical my parents wrote in the 1970’s in Australia. Via this personal investigation themes of land rights, urban development and dilemmas of feminism are discovered and mined. Through planes of experience the anxiety of storytelling, of what is real, fantastic and imaginary, are heightened through temporal displacement and the slippage of established roles and constructs.
Since moving to southern California, I have been particularly drawn to the alienating quality of the suburban landscape. I am interested in the fantasy of escape and how westward expansion has created sites of excess made to entice. Man’s desire to control and confine nature versus the desire to ‘return to nature’ creates formidable tension. Through a lens of female subjectivity I examine this desire for the landscape to be something it isn’t. In painting, video and other media I incorporate constructed narratives and imagined realities.
On October 21st I was hiking with my dog on the winding fire trails behind Magic Mountain. The path borders the “edge of nature”, where housing development has stopped (temporarily) and butts into open land of chaparral. Emerging stealthily, a pack of coyotes attacked me and dog. I finally escaped their stalking circle into the bright green of man’s scripted landscape—a golf course. This surreal experience had an uncanny resemblance to myth and fairytale. “Let’s call it, Valencia” is a reenactment in which I navigated the gray area between experience and representation, subjectivity and perception. I examined how memory is a function of interpretation while exploring the relationship between the authentic and the orchestrated. Vilem Flusser writes that we find ourselves in a period of expulsion, to survive we must take the chaos around us and interpret it as data—a conversion synonymous with creation. This act of conversion informs my art making practice.
Like Vilem Flusser, in Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, themes of time, space and memory are condensed into many structural, thematic and stylistic possibilities, due to the theory that art is produced from the transformation and synthesis of “experience” and “memory”. What is authentic then, since memory is subject to interpretation? In my practice, I enter the work that is incidental to experience, opening a personal microcosm into greater social and political themes. My next project entails unearthing an archive of a musical my parents wrote in the 1970’s in Australia. Via this personal investigation themes of land rights, urban development and dilemmas of feminism are discovered and mined. Through planes of experience the anxiety of storytelling, of what is real, fantastic and imaginary, are heightened through temporal displacement and the slippage of established roles and constructs.
