Take a Look at My Illustrations and Live Art Performances
Social Sculptures
Social Practice: Installation/Performance and Film
Please view two to three minutes of each excerpt. These short excerpts often cannot represent the timing or conceptual aspect of these works, which happen over a long duration and involve unhurried public interactions. Please read the descriptions to understand the context of each sample. Thank you!
Adult Female Human
At a de-consecrated convent, 1994 X-TeReSa, Arte Alternitivo. Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, Mexico City, Mexico
Materials: wire clothes hangers, printed material on reproductive rights, human uterus, dissected human heart, sheep’s brain, disinfectant, scrub brushes, pots and pans, jars
Social Structures
interactive installation performance space. Institute for the Study of Technology and Art, Tempe, Ariz. 1993-94
People interviewed in video projections: labor organizer, Mexican merchant, phone sex worker turned academic, homeless man, gay rights activist, homeless woman, elder Mexican woman
Materials: wire fencing, ornamental oranges, city benches, surveillance cameras, video monitors, computer components, $400 in quarters, the old cashier’s window from the San Francisco Art Institute (The Money Game), lots of rope, a clipboard (the Network Game), recycled plastic sheet board (The Box Game)
Social Structures
Interactive installation performance space.
Institute for the Study of Technology and Art, Tempe, Ariz. 1993-94
People interviewed in video projections: labor organizer, Mexican merchant, phone sex worker turned academic, homeless man, gay rights activist, homeless woman, elder Mexican woman
This video is an excerpt from the two-channel video installation: projections played continuously in the space, creating a key sound element. The interviews from the neighborhood are responses to questions about power. Other images in the video are juxtaposed to show the physical positions of power, or powerlessness, like the crouching figure.
The Mending Room
A public space for mending 2004 "Solo Mujéres, Women and Spirituality", Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts
San Francisco, California
Materials: baskets of clothes, sewing tools, video projections with audio of stories, table, chairs, a room made of linen, drawing materials
The Other Room / El Otro Ouarto
Video and performance Installation, 2001
Alteras por La Día de los Muertos,
El FARO, Centro Cultural, México DF, México
Materials: bread, coffee, flags, sugar, video, water, site, participants
Observaciones: Viendo Intermedio
Observations: seeing in-between
The Tenth Muestra Internacional de Performance Art, Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, Mexico DF 2001
Materials: coffee and bananas, pots, cups, video and sound elements, surveillance cameras, participants, the external house structure, the clear plastic internal house isolating the table, and people offering coffee and bananas in the center.
Observaciones: Viendo Intermedio
Observations: seeing in-between
The Tenth Muestra Internacional de Performance Art, Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, Mexico DF 2001
The Murals of Primero de Einero: Artists in the Zapatista Community - Beginning with a statement from the women who painted the murals, and then taking us into daily life, this video places us in among the people experiencing the low-impact war waged between the Mexican Government and the indigenous land reform movement, the Ejército Zapatista para la Liberación Nacional, EZLN (Zapatist Army for National Liberation). We participate in a project, sponsored by a local human rights organization, that involves video and mural artists assisting the villages of this Zapatista community to re-construct Mayan tribal histories through recorded interviews and communal murals.
Changing Room 2000 “What Is Art For?,”
Oakland Museum of Art, Oakland, California
Stone, cotton, rope, latex, carved foam, steel, glass, honey, manzanita branches, video projection, and sound elements
Changing Room is an evolving video installation work, created in response to stories of change in people’s lives. Womb/cocoon/tomb forms and simple performance actions of weaving and shedding reflected perceptions of change and impermanence. Every few days, the elements of the installation evolved with new elements of recorded sound, projected video, and sculptural forms. The objects pictured in the background are the bed cocoon, a resin-cast form, like the chrysalis of a butterfly.
SURVIVOR’S TABLE 2003 "Seventeen Reason’s Why,”
The Lab Gallery, San Francisco, California
Materials: metal school table, cups, spoons, coffee, rice gruel, video images and sound from SF peace marches inside table’s hole, projected images of buildings falling, and the conflicts and the survivors of various cultural sites are visible on the walls of the narrow 15 foot “house structure” built over the table
The Body Politic
2008 El Chopo Museum of Contemporary Art; Mexico City
This video performance is part of a series of pieces involving scars as “links” for memory and identity. “The Body Politic” is an intimate dance between truth and lies involving a confessional performance superimposed on a Right-Wing Smear Video which equates the goals of the United States presidential candidate Barack Obama with Marxist strategies for governmental control. The body is presented as
Progress, "A Series of Circles"
Subterranean Art House 2012 Berkeley, California
During the event, performers rocked themselves in various positions seated on the floor. A soldier rocks in pain, a mother rocks her child, and lovers rock in a quiet embrace. The world charges forward, reflected in the sound and moving image of the space.
Progress, a visual poem: an ode to our human struggle, ever charging forward, into the heroic myths that ensnare our beings, and to our spirit's instinct toward peace and toward its own freedom. The aesthetic approach of this work is a fusion between that of painting and film, utilizing both original and appropriated images that allude to the painting's historical war depictions, and the beauty of Impressionist landscapes, propelled by a deeply layered sound score.
Water Prayer
For Lake Cuitzeo 2020-21 ITZI Virtual Festival, 2020, Mexico, On the web.
This video performance premiered at the ITZI Virtual Festival, 2020, Mexico. ITZI is a festival supporting renewed life for Lake Cuitzeo, a large inland lake that is disappearing, and local indigenous water rights. The piece is a visual prayer that dances between science and spirit. The text is a scientific analysis of the lake.
Expanded Drawings
Portfolio of Drawings, Performances, and Installations
What We Cut Out
This drawing is about cutting away and letting go. It is about healing the wounds that are left, in order to survive. It is related to the performance and film work such as Mending Room, and Mi Otro Corazon.
It has phrases of text and collaged elements, the argument with “what is.”
Un-American
A response to the atrocities of Guantanamo Bay: revelations of the means justify the ends.
Ground Zero
This work is a fusion of digital processes, layering images of performance work, and video stills. The image is derived from performance work: Blood-drenched money was placed across the doorways of pro-war financial institutions. These performance images are blended with ashen images of the remains of the World Trade Towers.
Ephmeroptura Series
Named after an insect that completes its entire life cycle in one day, this series of impermanent drawings and installations contemplate the beauty of impermanence, and mourn the loss of life.
The Tree
This drawing-based installation formed a place for participants from the community to meet for portrait readings during the exhibition. It forms a symbolic shelter for human connection. I term this type of work Social Sculpture, because of the network of connection and communication that it creates.
The Tree Portrait
During this month-long exhibition, I made portrait drawings of the cultural workers at the Art Center. The portraits were integrated into the tree drawing, allowing the community to see their connection to each other through the drawings. This portrait sketch represents over a thousand such drawings I have made over the last several years. The portraits are accurate life-sized likenesses. The work is performed as a meditative exchange and follows a particular structure each time. I draw in silence, keeping eye contact as much as possible. Information arises and takes symbolic form illustrating emotional, intellectual, physical, and spiritual aspects of the person. In connection, we co-create the portrait: a fusion between art and healing.
At The Root
“Garden of Dreams”, The Bayview Studios, San Francisco, California.
This work is one of a series of installations between 2005 and 2008, exploring the psyche in relation to nature. Here, the body is laying five feet deep in the earth. Next to a large taproot, carefully uncovered. The performance aspect of this work lasted for four hours, a slow dance meditation of breath and movement.
The images resulting from this work are separate artworks unto themselves. I see these two images as finished artworks, and a direct evolution of my drawing and painting.
Frida's Child
This drawing was commissioned for a show of portraits of Frida Kahlo. Through this work, I refer to Kahlo as my “Lineage Mother,” in the same way that spiritual followers site their own teachers. She is pictured here as birthing me as an artist from a womb of her creativity. She is in a state of grace, having finally given birth to the child she yearned for.
New Story Please
The title of this piece refers to the desire to experience a “new” story, and not be trapped by the past. It has images of the harrowing tales told to me by my father, who lived in poverty as a Texas farm boy. It expresses a longing to break out of the old patterns of relating.
Mi Otro Corazon
Una Muestra Internacional de Arte Alternitivo, El Chopo Museum. Mexico City, DF
This performance piece is an attempt to examine the mystery we call romantic love. Performed in Garibaldi Square, a famous site for romantic music, and serenading groups of players, the audience of musicians became part of the larger social sculpture.
Arte De Accion
During 2001 and 2002, I was awarded research grants for an ongoing project in Chiapas. I set out to investigate how urban artists were interacting with the indigenous rights movement known as the Zapatistas, a vast revolutionary group made up of several Mayan tribes.
I interviewed and filmed for seven months, creating the basis for several projects with the people. One project focused on a re-cooperation of tribal history among the Ztotsil Mayan, and involved teaching painting and making murals with indigenous women in Chiapas, Mexico. We first recorded their stories on video, then the murals functioned as a way of remembering tribal histories, empowering the Mayan women (many of whom could not read or write) to tell their stories through film and communal artworks.
Observasiones
This work is a fusion of digital processes, layering images of performance work, and video stills. The image has been distilled from two main video projections, which observed the people of Mexico, and the power structures, both present and past, that oppress them. These video projections contrast the urban poor, with the indigenous people of Chiapas, and through images, reveal how each is caught in between cultural and political value systems, the contemporary and the traditional, the extreme right and extreme left.
Observasiones Drawing History
Materials: coffee and bananas, pots, cups, wood, clear plastic, video and sound elements, surveillance cameras, participants, the external house structure and the clear plastic, internal house isolating the table, and people offering coffee and bananas in the center. The video in the “observation window” on the right shows a Zapatista recounting tribal history; on the right, a “businessman” rewrites history on the transparent plastic walls.
Progress
At intervals in the course of my career, I return to drawing as a way to express, in a simple and direct manner, the complex experiences of life. This work distills the images of several prior works into an observation that one man’s progress is another’s oppression.
