anarobles9

Response work after reading “Good Talk” by Mira Jacob.

I really related to this quote from "Good Talk". Although I do not have the exact same experiences, as a queer person I have heard too many times, "I don't think someone would really do that" or "You're overreacting" when I try to bring up concerns surrounding the queer community. People seem to have trouble listening to my experiences and I get frustrated and angry, but I know that if I start yelling it'll just shut down the conversation. I'm left feeling like I'm going crazy, so oftentimes I turn to art to calm myself and clear my head. I hope if I can express my feelings well enough through art, maybe people will better understand and be able to have empathy, or at least offer comfort to those in similar situations, like Mira Jacob did for me.

Cancer is a very big topic in my family. My grandmother and great grandmother both died from cancer. I got diagnosed with Lynch Syndrome, which makes me extremely susceptible to a dozen different cancers. Everything I do, cancer is always in the back of my mind, wondering if the next time I go to the doctors, they'll tell me I have breast cancer, or ovarian cancer, or even skin cancer. When doing this video, I knew I wanted to highlight those who beat cancer. To show that there are people out there who are so strong, that they beat their own bodies, and can live a full life.

This video ended up being extremely symbolically powerful for me. As most artists will tell you, often the idea we start out with transforms through out the creative process.... The first time I watched it through I was floored because I had just spent the last 24 hours manically edititing it in a stream of conciousness type haze, not really knowing how the story would turn out, just losing myself in matching the sounds to the visuals...So when I saw it, it was really like seeing it for the first time. The video allowed me to read into my subconcious and gain a better understanding of deeper aspects of myself. I'm always confounded by the way art communicates with us, artists and observers, through some kind of chaotic symbolic extremely personalized code. Sometimes it makes you think.....dude, it's gotta be aliens, right?

For The Loop project, I decided to explore the feeling that comes from body-scan meditation which is something that often gets taught to people diagnosed with depression, anxiety, ptsd, did, and pretty much anyone else who has trouble staying present and calm. It's used as a way to recenter and pull the mind back to reality and focus on what sensations you are feeling: what the sun feels like on your skin, the texture of the things around you, the way your clothes feel resting on your body, your breathing, etc. I definitely took inspiration for some of the close-ups from this video: https://youtu.be/nvr7T4sfads which I highly recommend, but I wanted to find rhythm and colors that were less frantic and disturbing. I used a combination of my sister's hands and clothes and my own. I used the same wash and overlay for all of the gifs in order to maintain the same feeling across, which for a couple of them I do think could have been a little brighter. But, my goal was to make something kind of dreamy but to still seem like that worried attempt to center oneself before losing it, I guess.