♪ ♪
I come from a pretty traditional
sculpture background in the sense that I spent four years
in art school, literally just making things.
You know, to hand-make something mean
you're going to process it.
Like, it comes into your head,
and then it moves through your body,
and then it gets pushed back
out into the world.
[sewing machine whirring]
I'm interested in how objects reflect cultural moments.
And I think I'm trying to figure out, you know, why we value what we value.
[electronic music]
So with the "Counterfeit Crochet Project,"
I invited crochet crafters from all over the world
to join me in bootlegging designer handbags.
The invitation was to choose a designer handbag that you would like to own,
but couldn't afford, download an image from it online
and then using your own crochet crafting skills, hand-make it.
And interestingly, it touched a nerve, and, you know, lots of people started to join up,
and then send me photographs of themselves with their handmade bags.
It was fun and lighthearted, but invariably what would happen was, you know,
we would have these really great discussions about everything from the
hierarchy of the fashion system to you know, global counterfeiting schemes.
I think one of the reasons I got interested in this idea of like bootlegs
or counterfeits is actually, it's an extension from this idea that there is
an authentic, and you know from a very personal standpoint
I was really curious about what it meant to be an authentic, um, Filipino.
I was thinking a lot about historical
ethnographic photography
Specifically, um, images I'd seen taken in the Philippines.
♪ ♪
So the whole series is made in Omaha Nebraska, which I think is hilarious
And I had gone to the shopping malls,
and using my credit card, purchased mass-consumer goods,
took them back to my studio, and then styled them.
And then returned them all to the department stores for full store credit.
So it was kind of this way of thinking about what we wanna consume in those images,
partaking in it, but then also denying it.
This is something that, um...
It's a portrait of my mother and myself,
um, not long after we moved to, the U.S. from the Philippines.
And then for my birthday, she decided to take me to Disneyland.
And so this photograph is actually,
I think, in the Frontierland, where you can pay to have your portrait
taken after you put on all these western costumes.
I think, you know, at the time we were trying on these fictional identities of
what it might have looked like to be a new American.
Also, I mean, it's an amazing portrait.
Like, my mom is 22 years old here, and she looks beautiful,
and I'm this angry little four year old.
[Laughs]
- [singing "El Breve Espacio En Que No Estás"]
The title of my next exhibition is called "Citizens"
I think there's always been embedded politics in my work,
whether it's issues of colonialism or capitalism
but given recent politics I've been
really trying to figure out how to actually put it more at the forefront.
- Ready to fight?
Crowd: Damn Right!
- Are you ready to fight?
Crowd: Damn Right!
The Bay Area has been a real flash point for a lot of recent protests and so I
and so I feel like I've been in the middle of it.
You know, you watch the news, you watch images flashing by,
and you're kind of trying to process it all.
- We need to figure out how wide the actual banner is.
And I was noticing that this one particular banner kept popping up.
And depending on how it was held up,
or how it was being displayed you could or in some cases could not read the text
- Cool. - All right.
And so I downloaded those images,
and then, you know, traced it on the computer,
projected it onto a larger piece of fabric,
and then hand sewed it.
It says "Become Ungovernable," and it's kind of, you know,
I feel like the banner itself is becoming ungovernable.
Like, it's got loose ends, it's got, you know,
the text itself is kind of, like, falling off the page, um so it's trying to kind of embody that
um, so it's kitrying to kind of embody that,
that inability to be controlled.
One of the problems, I think, with slogans
is that people think they already know what the slogan means,
and so you can either shut off to it,
or you can, you know, nod your head in agreement.
So when I was using these images of protests,
I was more interested in actually how they're filtered
through media channels.
[Sewing machine whirring]
In a lot of my projects, I'm really interested in this connection between
the analog and the digital
So, I decided to create this huge hand sewn quilted checkerboard background
[mouse clicks]
And it resembles a Photoshop transparency background
When you cut out an image in Photoshop,
Photoshop will put in this like really weird you know, checkerboard pattern.
It's actually to point out this idea that,
you know, digital culture is not neutral
that simply because there's a computer
involved doesn't mean that there isn't human labor
♪ ♪
Um, hmm.
Yeah, let me go hand that to you.
Yeah, I think we could try something like this.
I feel like I'm constantly making things.
And I do feel like I have this ratio that I've worked out
where I call it the sort of 80/20 ratio,
where 80% of what I make is kind of crap,
but somehow I have to produce it to get to the 20%,
which is successful.
[laughs] It's kind of like rubble,
but not really. [chuckles]
- Did you all buy the fabric this color?
- Yeah, so this is, um, chroma key fabric, the green screen.
I've been gravitating to working with chroma key
which is this awful, acid color.
I'm standing in front of a green chroma key screen. Anything that you photograph
or shoot in front of this screen, you can put in any type of backdrop,
you can create a fantasy scene.
[laughter]
[camera shutter snaps]
And so, thinking about both politics and social strife
and everything that's kind of permeated and saturated everything,
you know, now it's just this kind of
constant in our backgrounds.
You know, what does that mean to then use chroma key as the literal subject
instead of ignoring it?
♪ ♪
- All right. Wanna grab that one, Durham?
So, I became a U.S. citizen when I was 26 years old. Despite having lived here
since I was three , I had to kind of make that decision,
and then go through the process of the citizenship test.
- All right, I am an..
I was thinking a lot about a 1942 photograph taken by Dorothea Lange.
and she had taken a photograph of an Oakland store front
where a Japanese American had a business there,
and upon the notification for Japanese internment
he had put up a sign in the window that just proclaimed "I am an American."
- Um, let's do the scrunching.
The idea that citizenship can be given and also taken away
was something that really interested me.
because I do feel like there's been a lot of Reckoning with people having to
struggle with what it means to be an American today.
Like, what do we stand for?
What can we become?
[cell phone snaps]
My current studio is located in a really industrial part of the Bay
It overlooks San Francisco, actually.
So, just looking out over the water, you can see it at a distance.
You know, I grew up in that city,
I relocated to Oakland four years ago,
because I couldn't afford to stay in San Francisco anymore.
You know, the Bay area can be a really wonderful kind of fermenting space for
for artists.
Not because it's easy to live here,
'cause it's not easy to live here,
but there are ways that artists can create community
and spaces for themselves here.
If we're to look at the complexity of our contemporary culture,
our political moment,
you know, our lived realities,
I want my work to be as
complicated as well.
That there isn't just one way to look at it, you know,
that depending on your perspective you'll see it a different way
And I also want it to inhabit contradictions.
- All right. Fierce
And so, you know, looking at images of protests,
we created these composite characters.
And so they're fictions.
Black-clad individuals are usually associated with,
you know, a kind of very direct action.
Is it a character that one finds problematic,
or is it something that might elicit even you know, some empathy?
There's a portrait of someone covered in a very sheer gray-and-white checkerboard pattern.
The portrait is of a person who is undocumented.
It's a difficult thing for me to talk about, actually,
because given the state of our contemporary political situation,
you know, that person could be taken at any minute.
Depending on how you read that image it's about either the removal
or about their protection.
One really important possibility for art
is that it is a recording device, you know.
I mean, it's a subjective one,
but it's a device, that, somehow through an individual or a group of individuals
processes a situation in the world,
and then creates a subjective viewpoint of that.
As evidence.
I do not think at all that my work, in and of itself,
is actually going to change the system
What I'm interested in though, is somehow reflecting a possibility.
What I'm doing is kind of like absorbing and processing the world around me,
and it's becoming political.
I don't think I have a choice anymore.
It's just my reality.
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