I would say I’m interested primarily in color.
And how color tells
a particular story for each person who experiences it.
And that color is experienced differently through every person’s eyes.
For me, from a quite early age,
I understood color in relationships to matters of the heart.
When I was quite young, my favorite color was purple.
Maybe it was something that I liked in grapes or liked in a certain kind of corduroy,
but that it also was reflective of how I saw myself
in relationship to maybe other colors
and other people’s taste in color.
For me, purple was how I understood myself.
I’ve been working for,
I’d say, 18 years in and around Philadelphia.
I grew up around this part of the world,
and also grew up in Caracas, Venezuela, where my father’s family is from.
I don’t have a medium that I prefer
because in my years of making I found that I’ve never met a medium I didn’t like.
Be it shampoo or paint or sequins
or whatever it may be, fingernails.
I find that I make work in the way that Dr. Frankenstein might.
It is largely collage, and what the collages are is some piece of art history
or some song that I’ve heard married together with a color
or texture and so on and so forth.
My grandmother was a quilt maker and told stories.
And so although my work is not a quilt exactly, I think about it in the same terms
that my work is a tapestry of lives and labor stitched together,
and it is meant to bring some kind of solace, as a quilt does.
And I found that there was a certain kind of magic
or compression that occurred
when these scrappy materials were sort of placed
in the frame of the TV screen or the movie screen.
And that that kind of magic, which had long appealed to me,
actually worked on the things that I had my hands in making.
The work I’m showing in
the Biennial is titled, ROY G BIV.
It is a one hour-long video projected on a large cube
that is ten feet by 13 feet by 13 feet,
which is painted every three weeks by my brother
a different color of the rainbow.
ROY G BIV is an acronym
which commonly stands for red, orange, yellow,
green, blue, indigo, violet.
And it’s also a name.
Roy G. Biv, Ms. Biv,
I am not sure, but I was thinking about this name, this person,
and a life that is made up of many colors.
And I thought, you know, it’s quite relatable that we’re all maybe a little bit of this,
you know, Ms. Biv.
We’re a cornucopia of colors and tastes and decisions that reflect onto the world.
Many years ago, I stumbled upon this photograph by Zoe Strauss,
and this particular photograph was of this couple where one had red, white, and blue,
an American flag painted on their face and they were making out with another person.
And this paint was smeared onto this other person’s face.
And that picture has always lingered for me.
This like bleeding and this kind of mixing that occurs
that is often times invisible between two people or between many.
I often go to the Philadelphia Museum of Art to think and to look.
And one day I was in the Gallery 280A, which is where they housed the Brancusi sculptures.
And I was looking at The Kiss sculpture, these two figures locked in place forever kissing.
And I was thinking of Zoe Strauss’s photograph.
And I thought, who are these two figures?
And what kind of love do they share after all of these years,
and imagined if their love was a color, maybe that color would be purple.
That individually
these two figures were once red and blue,
but in this loving embrace that they’ve endured for so many years,
they’ve become purple.
And what would it look like if we reverse engineered
this kiss to say, who are they as individuals?
What does the emancipation of this kiss look like?
I was doing quite a bit of research about Marcel Duchamp,
and in 1954, he helped assemble and place
the Brancusi works in said gallery as a marker
of his friendship with Brancusi.
There was a kind of brotherhood there, an admiration.
Their work being so different.
We have come a long way from what we actually felt.
It mattered to me and it was quite urgent that this film
be a portrait of these ways in which we share our tastes
and our differences.
So in this film I play most of the characters.
You see the character of Marcel Duchamp,
Marcel Duchamp’s alter ego, Rrose Sélavy,
and the Joker, which is inspired
by Tim Burton’s Batman from 1989.
I would say it’s a five-act play
that takes you through this journey of black and whiteness,
or some said binary, to something that is more fluid and kaleidoscopic
and free and unbound.
And then the film
kind of shifts gears where now that we're living in this world,
this kind of dream space where we understand that what was once fixed can be new,
the viewer sees that now these sculptures
have agency, and agency kind of outside of the artist or the maker
and what it means for these characters to kind of step into their own.
The film is shown within this large cube.
And as it sits in the museum, every so many weeks
there’s a performance that happens
where my brother, who has been a house painter for 30 some years,
will go to the museum and paint this cube,
and essentially take it from the minimalist white through the colors of the rainbow.
Red, orange, yellow,
green, blue, indigo, violet.
So much of my work
is concerned with this invisible labor and invisibility and making it visible.
My brother has dedicated his whole life to painting,
but so often painting is invisible.
And so I wanted to quantify
my brother’s craft and my brother’s dedication to a craft
that is related to and largely defined by invisibility.
And I wanted it to be center stage.
I wanted it in some ways to consume and absorb the canon.
And so then the cube again is also not fixed
because the Cube’s favorite color isn’t just blue and always blue.
The cube’s favorite color is the full gamut of the rainbow.