Adviser: Maya Schindler
I Was an Angel Once
I’m a Latinx Sagittarius born in 1994 and raised on Long Island, NY. I’ve been artistically inclined since childhood, a shy kid spending most of my time drawing portraits with pencil on computer paper. I studied English briefly at CUNY Macaulay Honors College at Hunter College, later moving on to study art at Suffolk County Community College where I drew and painted portraits and still lives primarily, focusing on realism, and then later exploring abstract mono-printing. I received an Associate’s degree in visual art and am currently completing my BA in studio art at Stony Brook University with a concentration in drawing, painting, and printmaking. Despite my concentration, I’ve also been experimenting with music, poetry, performance, social media as medium, divination using UNO cards, and with animation and video art. My art began as a practice of realism but has evolved into an investigation of sorts after having a profound, beautiful, yet highly traumatic spiritual experience within the past two years. Since then, I’ve found my purpose for art-making, but my art is currently in a developmental stage; I am still figuring out a language with which to communicate my ideas. I am invested in the idea that we are living in an organic simulation, an ancient chain reaction, that we are simply light possessing matter, learning how to flow through life like water down a stream. I believe that our lives are simply a metaphor, our brains constructing what we know to be reality from the information our senses perceive. I don’t believe in the idea of chaos, I believe that the universe has an order dictated by mathematics, that our lives follow a pattern, and when someone has a premonition (like I have in the past) or experiences a synchronicity, it is a glimpse into this divine pattern, seeing for a moment beyond the veil of our constructed reality.
So far, the progress I’ve made in terms of visual language includes using what I call “squiggles” (I enjoy using this word because it carries a certain silliness, and while I do think life can be serious, I also think divinity has a sense of humor) to represent waves of energy as well as the self moving through spacetime, repeating numbers as messages from divinity, circles as the eternity of the present, spheres as the shape of the universe, pink for divinity, femininity, the frequency of the universe, green for nature as well as the heart, blue for sadness, but also wisdom, yellow for joy (the happiness experienced after a hardship), orange for creativity and infinity, turquoise for truth, red for masculinity, for courage, but also fear. I’ve assigned meaning to different colors based on my own personal experience with them as well as the collective associations (such as colors assigned to different energy centers or “chakras” in the body). Life as a part of reality is an association game: the mind can define and shift our reality in that the associations we make with certain patterns (letters) and certain colors (red means stop, green means go) alter our movement through it. I think the ability of the mind to have developed language and have developed these associations is a miracle.
What also strikes me as a miracle is the invention of the internet as well as smart phones to access it from virtually any location. Phones have become portals of sorts for light and sound, sucking in light through the cameras, sound through the microphone, and spitting them back out in a million or so different directions through use of cellular data or wifi. I think that in a sense, they’re like man-made wormholes, allowing us to share visual and auditory information and make contact with one another in ways we never used to be able to. I am drawn to using my own phone and social media to create art for several reasons, including that I find that it is a form of art-making which is accessible; I can create works of art from the comfort of my bed on days when I am physically and mentally unable to leave it. I am also taken by the concept that a phone, especially one equipped with AI, is an extension of the self; it is an extension of our senses of sight and hearing, of our cognition, molded to our bodies in that it is made to interact with our hands. Emojis are like modern hieroglyphics, a visual and wordless emotive language, and predictive text is like artificial intuition. Lastly, I find that social media is often overlooked as a medium. An Instagram feed is the visual manifestation of time passing, of the light that we see which we then capture with our extended selves (phones) to create an artificially-living self portrait. Feeds (as well as a phone’s photo album) are highly intentional and can be curated, used to create patterns and compositions, digital drawings, paintings. I am interested in not only creating these digital compositions, but also transforming them into physical paintings, giving them tangible weight, presence, and altered scale, framing them traditionally as the paintings which they already are. I’ve been heavily screenshotting my Instagram feed, my text conversations, the pictures within as well as the process of scrolling through my Camera Roll, and my most recent emojis, as through this process I’m taking virtual photographs which can not only be used to create compositions, but can then also be used as frames to create animated videos that illustrate the passage of time, this inhabitation of the self in a digital dimension. For many of these screenshots, I like to keep the original cropping as this is the manner in which I view the information through my phone and this cropping often includes a time stamp at the top or shows the folder or feed through which I am exploring, adding another layer of time and context, assigning visual evidence to the revisitation of old moments. The video that I created for my project, titled Green (555) is a self portrait composed primarily of screenshots of images off my Instagram feed and from my camera roll which I felt embody the experience of seeing into the divine pattern which I discussed earlier. It also includes screenshots of my usage of social media to create moving forms and shimmering visuals, such as my using the perspective tool and the filters in Instagram to make a picture “dance” and change colors. Ideally, this video would have been projected onto a canvas measuring 36” X 64”, meant to mirror the viewer (really myself as the canvas is just over my size) who stands before it, a reminder of how much of the self is contained within our phones and how often we’re visiting this virtual world.
Although I’ve experimented with many media, I still consider myself a painter and drawer at heart. I think the practices of each are metaphors for life in that they too are illusions and are light (the self/god) processing light (using one of the senses, in this case sight) and moving matter (in this case pigment). They are practices of moving matter with intention in order to create an illusion and as such can be used as a means of communicating the experience of seeing beyond the illusion of reality. Part of what I observed during my experience is that this pattern of processing light and moving matter can be seen throughout every living interaction, from art-making, of course, to eating, reading, walking (this pattern still applies to people who are unable to see). In my opinion, it is a law of life. My most significant artistic influences include Hilma af Klint, Ana Mendieta, Frida Kahlo, Allison Schulnik, and Dan Gilhooley, all of whose work have a distinct level of emotion, spirituality, and symbolism. I am still learning and developing as an artist, taking inspiration from the signs and synchronicities I experience on a daily basis, experimenting with different media, trying to find a way to communicate my interpretation of reality with the world.
