The Social Funk

Beeman,

Fellowships are a way of spreading good nature and the peace of man to institutions across the world and even in our local international community. In the past my art has been informed on my personal experiance growing up labled by society an alien to this country. I was born here and grew up here, honestly spanish is not even a second language to me. Its a third language like piglatin, It is a product of the assimalation that I felt during my formative experiances. This tension between understand where i came from in the context of the traditionally Bigotted Amerrican South still resignates with me today. I find my self drawn to abstract dialogues, think of visual metaphors like splashes of colors and sounds used to create a unified work. These allagories foot prints of who I figured I would be. The last few years in college have produced some of the most interspective work, I honestly did not think I had it in me to press forward with concepts from semster to semester. An early tearcher once told me "That's bull shit Jorge. You are seventeen years old and you expect me to belive that there are no ideas floating around that big head of yours. There are whole lifetimes played out in the few seconds that it takes to type one sentance." What I guess he was saying is that we have a privlage in our day and age. We have seen the rise of memory cards. We don't rely on archain books to keep track of all information. If you wonder what the origin of a word is you can google it. If you wonder if that word has ever been used to name a movie you can look it up. If an artist used a word as a pivital spark of intuition for a whole movement, it would probably take a second, but you could figure it out. What is this unified central storage device that holds our past as well as documents our present while still maintaining a dialogue about the future you might ask? Well let me blog about it for a second, there you go. Thats what it was, if you missed it then I guess you just missed some perception of god. Before this gets more long winded than it should I'd like to speak about Mexico City. The foot hold for many empires who hoped to get thier foot in the new world. Mexico as a country became the old west of time once conquistadors came to rape murder and plunder in the name of god glory and gold. Mexico City is a place that hold these abstract socially constructed lables from street to street. Once when I was younger I remember going to Mexico to meet my grandmother. It was my first time there. I noted that the streets were in grids, for a fourteen year old to be paying attention to archatecture and city planning is a big thing in my family. I also noted that the street names dictaed the distrects. There is a distrect called The Roses, In the Roses districts there are streets named after rosey flamboyant flowers. Not because of any modern context but because at some point in time that was where the forum for selling fragrant plants. When I say forum I mean forum, The streets of Mexico City can come to look like modern metropolitan bussleing centers. Two blocks over you will see scenes that look like they have been handed down generation to generation since the time of columbus. Mexico City represents a city so routed with a violent past that it has chosen to assimalate with the past to create a bearable present and brighter future. This idea is visible in the eyes of the people who live there. It is also a brilliant moment to see forigners come to this almost mystical place and realize just how far the city has come.

-jslm