Echoes
My hybrid book Echoes is a combination of literary text with autobiographical details and colored pencil drawings that I have been working on for 2 years. The text is pretty self-explanatory; it is a defensive and ironic auto-justification of my aesthetic compositions, which are often regarded as suspicious. I find it ridiculous that I have to explain a book that explains itself for the third time. The whole purpose of the text is to explain a psychological survival characterized by the need to focus on repetitive tasks to stop my mind from wandering into a dangerous field of obnoxious negative thoughts generated by instability and horrendous people who feed on my vulnerability. There are really not a lot of ways to say this. Read the book, and you will discover just another no-name immigrant navigating a world that is still hard to understand, even after 7 years of living here. The more time I have spent working on my technique and concepts that helped me shape my own artistic identity – such as talking about resilience, and the need to be seen, the more I despise explaining it. The more time I spend loving what I create in silence, the harder it becomes to fully enjoy art in dedicated spaces without feeling disappointed that contemporary art seems to have nothing to do with the artist’s story or the quality and depth of their artistic practice. All that seems to matter is being loud and ‘knowing someone.’
