STATEMENT

 
 
Reality is a social construct. The place we live in, our history, and our personal and collective identities are all products of a convoluted process of selection and recombination, governed mainly by partial interests and ideologies replete with contradictions. How we conceive our world, and how we build and modify it physically, is very similar to the way in which we come up with and tell stories, whether it be with words or images. We mythify, we try to reconcile or ignore the inconsistencies, the imperfections, the ambiguities. We try to find comfort in stories that have a beginning, a middle and an end, where everything is straightfoward, and all the pieces fit. But life is not really like that, and not all stories have to be told that way.

Making art is another way of telling stories.

 
I studied film, art and philosophy in college, and was particularly interested in everything that had to do with the construction of narrative codes, of language and of the symbolic. Through my work I attempt to observe and delineate the details that reveal the fabricated nature of “reality”, which we tend to perceive as monolithic and seamless. I enjoy experimenting with the specificity of the media I employ, and my methodology leaves ample room for aleatory, accidental occurences, which happen spontaneously during the process of creation, and in many cases define it.

Some of the recurring themes in my work are: memory and identity, both personal and collective; urban development, consumerism, and their environmental consequences; and the inner workings of the artworld, with emphasis on its relation to the general public. They are serious issues, so I prefer to adopt an ironic, playful or absurdist tone. I have concentrated mostly on video and photography-based projects, but have also made several installations, which feature strong pictorial elements, and I believe that is no coincidence. Recently, I rediscovered the pleasure and plasticity of drawing. I have always drawn, but during the past two years, I have been doing so in a more serious fashion. As I make gradual progress, I have begun to realize that my drawings have a lot in common with the rest of my work, both in topic and tone.

Regardless of the medium espoused, all my work aims to manipulate and stress the blurry borders that exist between iconography and idealogy, in hopes of challenging, destabilizing and altering the knotty system of perceptions, representations and values we tend to call “reality”.