Today we’d like to introduce you to Paul Pescador.
Paul, we’d love to hear your story and how you got to where you are today both personally and as an artist.
My name is Paul Pescador. I am an artist and filmmaker and live in Eagle Rock, California with my small pup Scout. I grew up in the hot dry climate of the Palm Springs region upon the tumbleweeds and coyotes. As a child, there was not a single house in any direction for miles just the desert landscape. I came to Los Angeles as an adult to both study art and film, first at the University of Southern California and then a Master’s from the University of California, Irvine. I maintain a studio in Northeast Los Angeles filled with colorful costumes, boxes and tchotchke.
We’d love to hear more about your art. What do you do you do and why and what do you hope others will take away from your work?
In my art practice, I use bright colors as a stand-in for corresponding lovers, family members and pets. I am interested in shifting between revealing and concealing intimate personal narratives. The experiences are retold again and again and each time they morph and reconstruct into different versions of themselves. By obsessively retelling stories of personal relationships, daily interactions and physical trauma am I seducing or distancing the viewer? Are abstract images more relatable than my personal experiences, or is this distinction even possible?
I produce photographs, videos and performances that include cheap and colorful objects from 99-Cent Stores throughout Los Angles and the eclectic patterns of textiles from the Garment District. Their color and texture help the anecdotal aspect of my stories become full melodrama. The studio objects are used for differently between mediums, a piece of plastic fruit, for example, can function like a character in a film, a prop in a performance and a figure in a photograph.
The seeming objectivity of repetition of storytelling becomes generative for making art; allowing for an event to become retold in different modes, constantly evolving and regenerating.
The sterotype of a starving artist scares away many potentially talented artists from pursuing art – any advice or thoughts about how to deal with the financial concerns an aspiring artist might be concerned about?
As an artist, it is always a challenging maintain a practice and financial support themselves. I work at a arts non-profit Downtown so my daily life involves juggling my art practice and my full-time job. On any given weekday, I will rush from my house in Eagle Rock to my studio in Lincoln Heights by 8 am so that I can get a few hours of work in before I get to the office. Come 6 pm I will leave work, go home to pick up the pup and then back to the studio. Somewhere along the way dinner happens for me and Scout.
Do you have any events or exhibitions coming up? Where would one go to see more of your work? How can people support you and your artwork?
I currently am in the Getty Pacific Standard Time initiative for the show Coastal/Border at Angels Gate Cultural Center. I am exhibiting a full-length feature film about my travels to South America and Mexico to trace Walt Disney’s US government led trips to Latin America between 1941-1943.
During my visits, I interviewed local residents about their reaction to Disney’s Latin American geared films and the lasting impact of his trip in each country now over 70 years later. I also documented my own experience traveling as a Mexican American and the role being a tourist documenting “foreign lands”. The exhibition is currently on view through December 17 with the feature film screening twice a day at 1 pm and 3 pm. For more information: http://angelsgateart.org/gallery/coastalborder/
Also this past spring my first collection of writing “CRUSHES: A NOVELLA” was released by Econo Textual Object. CRUSHES is an auto-fictional narrative of observations and abstractions, of unrequited intimacies and overexposed encounters in 24-hour spas, shifts in sight and recognition, and lots of drunk texting. For more information: https://www.etsy.com/listing/510517220/crushes-a-novella-by-paul-pescador
Contact Info:
- Website: paulpescador.com
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