I used this residency to test my ideas and vision concerning The Masked Series.
This word has become my inspiration as an artist who has lived a life of duality and contradictions. How can I be a feminist when I am an exotic dancer? How can I be Chicana when neither of my parents were born in Mexico? I would like to start a movement that anyone who is born in American is American regardless of their past ancestry? Isn’t that inclusivity? Isn’t that taking all people regardless of race and making a new land their land too? How beautiful is that? And do we know of such a magical land where you can leave your homeland and make it your homeland without any prejudice?
According to Gloria Anzaldua, the mestiza is “in a constant state of mental “nepantilism”, which allows the meztiza to transfer the cultural & spiritual values of one group to another. She goes on to say in her essay “Toward a New Consciousness”, “the work of the mestiza consciousness is to break downt he subjet-object duality that keeps her a prisoner and to show in the flesh and through the images in her work how duality is transended.” In other cultures, mixed breed words like mulatto & half breed have taken on universal meaning like mestiza, universally meaning mixed breed. Nobody is puro anything…
Fed up with the lousy meaningliess press, I decided to create my own fantasy of what I think my work deserves: During my residency at La Curtiduria, I put together an 8 page newspaper to validate my work as a new philosophy/possiblity/shift in my generation of art. Very little has been written about the cartoon related to classical art or an counter alternative, anti, to Pop Art, a movement that has become the defining art of America.
I am grateful for having some press instead of none. But what is the press selling? Entertainment, Sex or my art? Are they rounding up collectors of art? Or customers for lap dances for $20? None of this press has advanced my career with sales of my work, with solo exhibitions….etc….I’m Tired of the cheesy press coverage and not being taken seriously….
I agree to these shows because I was hoping that somehow my career would benefit from it. But I hardly get any press and press for many of these curators have not been important. When I go to these shows, the message of my work is watered down.
Why Should I Be Granted A Solo Exhibition over another Artist?
For the last several decades the word ‘cartoon’ has been associated with western popular culture. For example, 60s Pop artists Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol used Donald Duck and Dick Tracy in their paintings. However, when I took animation classes in 1999, I realized that the cartoon was related more to Classical Art than to modern Pop Art. I had to know anatomy in order to make the cartoon walk correctly across the screen. I did what animators call 鍍 u rnarounds � in order to keep the proportions, or should I say distortions, consistent throughout the entire animation. � 典 h e cartoon is nothing more than a minimalist drawing and a classical figure is an over-rendered cartoon. � The word 田 a rtoon � is actually derived from an Italian term cartone , which were simple outline drawings used to model large works before transferring them to tapestries or murals. 的 was at the Louvre Museum in Paris when I saw the word cartone for the first time and was fascinated by how the meaning has changed. �