Justin Lewis: Senior Portfolio: Artist #11 - 3.6.10

I was browsing the Art 21 website and I came across Arturo Herrera. His work, like mine, is inspired by music. He uses methods of splicing and re-contextualizing various sources into abstractions. This method reminds me of how some music is made. Often artists, particularly hip-hop producers, will slice up music samples by other artists and rearrange clips to form a new composition, often with a totally different sound than the original song. I found this quote by Herrera where he relates music to his work that I thought was great,

"Music is related to the way of thinking for what I do- because music offers no solution. It has no content. It’s just total subjectivity. So it lasts for a limited time, and it’s gone. Unless somebody plays it...it’s just non-existent. This experience of making it happen and then disappear- the transient nature of music- is fascinating to me. I’d like the visual images that I’m trying to do to be nonobjective, just like music"

This is a good expression of how I am feeling lately. I am trying to incorporate imagery in my work, but the problems I am coming up with are that when I listen to music I do not usually imagine a scenario, or an image per say. Instead I imagine a quality that might be found in an image, but might not be the subject of the photo. So when I attempt to juxtapose images that I feel have these qualities, their content seems at odds with what I might be trying to say. I want my images to be abstract and non-objective, but I feel a pressure to use photos of things because it seems like using abstraction doesn't communicate anything to anyone anymore. I feel like abstraction is the best (and maybe only) way to visually express music. It doesn't have to be like a visualizer, but to use a combination of objective images seems too close to a film.

Here is some of his work