Leticia LariosVelasquez

I started [off as a visual artist] taking visual art classes while in high-school, over three [two] decades ago. [Some years] After completing my BFA in photography, I  worked a couple of years in one of the top commercial photography rental studios in NYC and as a printing assistant to a fine-art photographer.  I also volunteered as an ESL instructor and at a community darkroom. I found it difficult, though, to keep up a photographic practice, especially darkroom printing my own work.  Darkroom printing outside of college was even more expensive - now there were darkroom rental fees in addition to the cost of photographic paper.  [I made]  It was a bit of an abrupt break from [art that lasted almost a decade.] what had been a consistent practice - I had spent so much time printing in the darkroom.  I, also, though, wasn't on a path to commercial work such as photojournalism or advertising photography (including fashion.)  The ideas I had for my own (i.e. not college assignments) fine art photography projects were few.  Perhaps more of consequence though, I’d also come to a point where visual representation [no longer held meaning for me (too strong and too general a statement - it's not like I couldn't make sense of an image or identify what an image was of.  What I meant by 'no longer held meaning' - too much missing context and analysis for photo-journalistic images for them to do any political work on their own); I felt that I could no longer just take in images of visual works (Again, too general a statement - It's not like I couldn't look at a photograph.  I did though need a balance!  Especially with the flood of documentary and journalistic photographs, or access to, that digital photography and the internet allowed.)] Seeking different ways of thinking about the complex socio-economic-political realities of our world, I turned to philosophy.

    

     This was a time in which I deeply questioned art, which had once been a refuge for me, nihilistically questioning what I did, aborting ideas before I’d even begun. I questioned the value, role, and production of art; I  engaged ethical and epistemological questions in regard to it.  Only after attempting to think about the world independently of imagery [A thought exercise that I constructed for myself!  As a woman with eyesight, It's not like I could go about living and being in the world independent of vision and coming across images!  It was just a reflection on what the world would be like WITHOUT any art - without any photographs whether fashion, journalistic, documentary, etc, any paintings, any sculpture - and I couldn't really imagine such a world.] Only then did (visual) art start to regain value for me. I have put in a lot of work – reflecting and writing to get through this questioning and have gained a renewed meaning of what art is for me and a deepened appreciation for it in all forms.

    

      Since then, I’ve slowly returned to art-making, starting in the summer of 2016 when I needed "something” to help me stay the course as I continued to emerge from a personally rough past few years. I began, again, in the same way that I had when I first took to art, working intuitively. [working contra any compulsion to interpret my work (as one might for a therapist). ( At least initially.)  (*I believe people make huge and harmful judgments about what an artist's artwork represents.  Just a quick and brief example - the use of the color black taken as representing something dark in a negative or "evil" way.)] [After this period of challenge and confrontation with meaning (the challenge and confrontation was just an examination of referents, meaning what's behind an idea or concept), a return to art and writing have been a way of reconstituting ground. (By 'reconstituting ground', I just mean that thought and emotions and feelings aren't such an entangled knot.  And it was writing that helped untangling, thinking things through and writing out that thought process and not art that helped with the untangling.  But hey, this is an art statement.  Art, for me, is the expressive vehicle.)]

    

     I am convinced that art, in any medium, is a crucial space for maintaining freedom of thought and expression [even freedom has limitations!], a ground that must be held for speech which might not be spoken otherwise. [The speech I'm referring to here is specifically political speech that isn't allowed under a dictatorship.  I had been to the Hammer museum's exhibition "Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985" and was moved by the work of Argentinian artists who literally could not speak out against the government.  When I wrote the above, I didn't think it would need clarification because political speech is the only thing I was thinking about.  My vision is for my art to be a space to express and nurture desires – for the sensual, erotic, and political - that differ from what we are expected to want.  (*Delete?  All I meant by 'nurture desires ... that differ from what we are expected to want' is: (1) in regards to the erotic (and love) is to nurture a desire that follows the heart and not status or image, which I do think is against 'what we're expected to want' in the sense that modern society is so image heavy - so, if I make any images when it comes to love or the erotic, then I hope it's aesthetically satisfying and poetic, conveying the warmth of flesh, instead of cold clinical pornographic imagery.  (2) in regards to the sensual - by that I mean what involves use of our senses in experience of the world, so artwork that holds onto at least some tactile aspect and texture.  (3) in regards to the political - by that I mean political engagement to be more than just consumer choices.  This part of my statement is mostly not relevant because I'm not really working with (1) or (3).  I think I do work with (2)   I wasn't thinking what it seems like others might be thinking (and I say this because of weird ass behavior that I haven't any idea what's the reason for it) so there isn't any way I thought a clarification would be needed.]

 

My artistic process in its broadest form is a practice with what is at hand. One aim subsumed under this broad sense of practice is to shift ideas of art and artist away from essentialized notions, [especially in regard to production envisioned in the image of mass production and corporate office hours, opening the space for artists to work in whatever way they have to when life is not cooperating for a consistent studio practice. (*rewrite)]

    

     For me, this currently looks like working with the limitations and challenges of what is at hand. This is not solely about materials. It’s about work inspired by and produced during quotidian activities, such as walks, and the many hours spent in solitude in the latter half of my life. I see this work, no matter the subject it takes, as expressing a commitment and calling attention to this world, this life, as the only world we have and so worth fighting for.

    

     I have a general interest [in sound and scent as providing a [subconscious] non-propositional index of the (external) world (*This "interest" was due to a philosophy class at the time and a question that arises from logical puzzles when trying to write a proof for the existence of the external world, something along these lines, if I remember correctly; I thought I had a good response with sound and scent.  This though isn't an "interest" that arose outside of the class and so, for me, wasn't an organic interest.  I am though very attuned to sound and scents.] and in photographing my nighttime environment. This isn’t photo-journalistic as much as it is a documentation of one of my original sources of aesthetic experience. There’s a tension between the art objects produced and my intention. I do not want to romanticize or aestheticize my circumstances. The art object is not a justification for the virtues of poverty but evidence of humanity, dignity. It is a product of a search for beauty, for love, for justice. [Thematic interests include time: the coexistence of linear and cyclical time, and the impulse to account for one’s time here, one’s time lived. (*Delete? or re-write?]

    

     I also see my interrupted practice as challenging notions of what art is, though not in regard to object or analysand but in regard to agency - my artistic practice [seemingly a broken (nothing is broken!)] a punctuated line.