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ARTS THINKING
LISA ALVARADO
Lisa Alvarado is a musician and visual artist based in Chicago, Illinois, and she fuses these two disciplines by making what she calls traditional object paintings that hang as banners or backdrops when she performs on the harmonium and gong onstage as part of Joshua Abrahm’s band, Natural Information Society. I first experienced Lisa’s traditional object paintings when researching the hybridized practices of artist/musicians at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago’s exhibition: The Freedom Principle: Experiments in Art and Music, 1965 to Now.
The Freedom Principle exhibition moved me in ways that are difficult to describe, the way that only artwork, making emotion and empowerment tangible, can. Inspired in part by the fiftieth anniversary of the formation of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), it was an adventurous and dynamic investigation of musical culture as seen through the lens of visual art, considering collaboration as an impetus for an amazing outpour of creativity and generative discourse on race, politics, and nationalism in the 1960s. Indeed, it was a major catalyst in solidifying my interest in concentrating on hybrid practices for this thesis. Almost synesthetic, one could feel the presence of these musicians, collectives, and artists, and hear the sounds of their instruments and conversations. Two of Lisa’s traditional object banners hung in the show, and I could feel their presence as if they were another body experiencing the exhibition beside me.
Though this first interview was closer to an informal studio visit, it sparked my interest in the artist interview as a form to play with for my thesis project. Inspired by my visit with Lisa, I wanted to find a way to translate the experience not only subjectively, but emotively. To do this, I created my first visual interview accompaniment in the form of an interactive sculpture to represent the themes I saw in Lisa’s work, and to mediate a spoken presentation I gave in one of my classes about the experience. In essence, it is a modular “collage,” where each puzzle piece represents a facet of Lisa’s work that can be seen throughout her hybrid practices. These puzzle pieces can be taken apart and reassembled by the user in order to create their own sculpture, in essence creating something new every time using the same set of tools. The main themes I distilled from our conversation correspond to their representation though the six pieces as follows (left to right):
EMILY OWEN
Interactive Sculpture; reflection on Lisa Alvarado's practices, 2015
Paper, collage on foamcore
History: Personal and cultural history is central to Lisa’s work. Harkening to religious practices and her own experience of growing up in Southern Texas, Lisa explains that these histories are central in the ways her work is made into objects.
Pattern-making: The most prominent aspects of Lisa’s traditional objects are the color and geometric patterns. Hand drawn, and at times imperfect, she creates the patterns herself, methodically including at least 5 different repeated elements that she explains are inspired by principals of pattern in numerology.
Simultaneity and presence: Lisa explains that for her, being an artist means making spaces for situations, and approaching and describing places in different ways that simultaneously can combine the senses. When she makes paintings, she always listens to music, and when she later looks at the paintings, she can hear the music that “created” each particular instance.
Spirituality: Lisa explained that she envisions these paintings as spiritual objects, referencing religious artifacts and artwork such as altarpieces and screens. Viewing the paintings is a ruminative experience, where one might quietly follow the pattern and color in almost a meditative way.
Balancing (opposites): Though some elements logically flow together, others contrast or need to be balanced. Central to Lisa’s process, she continually experiments with the ways different color and shape combinations react when next to one another, in a similar way the banners influence and balance the on-stage experience next to the musician’s performance.
Ambiguity: Though the creation of these objects is cathartic and meaningful, it is not always easy or without flaws. Lisa explains that every time she makes a new painting or creates new music, there is an inevitable period of not knowing, without which the artwork would have no new interesting paths to pave. Often times this halting progress is solved thought happenstance, or serendipitous ideas that emerge out of this period of ambiguity.