I spoke with Tatiana Cuevas Guevara about my project again today. It is good to speak with her about things. She was asking me about this sense of fantasy in the work, and I quite like that about the piece… how it is very clearly in line with the ideas that I have been working with in my previous paintings, but taking it from a very different approach. Instead of creating this fantastical world through painting, I am experiencing it through mistranslations and guesses, the strangeness of foreign eyes, missing bits of information and fragments of history parsed together in correct and incorrect ways, and attempts at interacting with it all in my own awkward way, which in the end becomes rather comical. I feel as if I am within one of paintings in this environment.
We discussed the location of my situation at the heart of the city in Zocalo, and how it is in itself a rather fantastical place to be. Thinking back upon my number of weeks here, I have stumbled across numerous events that have seemed quite odd and otherworldly to me… men with machine guns lined up as I go into a museum one day, stumbling upon a family wedding, then pomp and circumstance in the square, a saint’s day celebration with people in costume, a political demonstration involving a large line of men in underwear with the face of a political figure over themselves, tents of union demonstrators and large numbers of traffic controllers, and then the construction of some kind of gigantic looking stage or who knows what….. and all this amongst lots of doughnuts and balloons and music and honking horns sizzling street food and sing-song vendors…. and loads and loads of “stuff”—colorful noisy smelly stuff. My piece is most certainly reflecting this and more.
However, it is also so exhausting. The city itself can be exhausting, and I am struggling with this a bit… my own exhaustion of making the work, and then stepping through this endless amazing, but also overwhelming environment. I’m feeling quite tired. Another day, another mark to make.
