An untitled family project

Attempting to explain the reasons why I felt that academia was not a fruitful environment for me to develop my work and why I needed to complete my thesis project elsewhere, I wrote to one of my professors:

„The irrelevant and distracting curriculum noise, the self-congratulatory art speak, the textual logic applied to all visuals, the distrust of intuition and the narrow analytical processing, prevented me from executing my work with the intuition and humility that it needs.”

I don´t think that this description is specific to the program I was in at Ryerson, I think it could be used to describe pretty much any graduate art program in any western university today. While educators of art suffer from a crippling penis envy towards the sciences and insist on reducing visual language to a form of writing, art programs in universities will be harmful places for artists. I really hope that the times we are living through will soon be referred to as the middle ages of art education and that future generations of aspiring artists won´t be subjected to this sillyness.

One of my goals here in Mexico was therefore to use the time to finish the project I have been working on recently; a photobook consisting of images that I have made of my family over the past 27 years, or from the moment I met Þórdís in 1989. Since the book is very different from my previous one, this time requiring careful considerations of sequencing forming a subtle narrative, I have found it unusually complicated and challenging. I feel that intellectual logic is useless in this regard, the work requires a more visceral approach and the time here in San Pablo Etla, away from urban distractions, has allowed me to address it in this way.

For the first month and a half here I did not look at this work at all, in hope that it would allow me to see it with somewhat fresh eyes. When I came back to it again I made a rough selection of about 200 images and had a lab in Oaxaca print a roll of small digital prints which I then cut up and started editing. Above is a collage of the process and below is a short sequence example from the book, hopefully to be published before too long…