Burden of Culture and History Project

Installation with paintings and works on paper, 2000

For my MFA exhibition at the Claremont Graduate University, I worked with the idea of creating conceptual Chicano art. I am both a painter and a digital artist, and I am challenged to bring the two together for some exhibitions. For my MFA project I created "The Burden of History Project" as a way of displaying both of my interests of painting and digital art in the same gallery. This exhibition included many elements: panel paintings, digital works on paper, and a computer playing my Internet Web piece, "The Burden of History," http://www.elpayaso.com/bur1.htm, on my Web site http://www.elpayaso.com. These elements are arranged in the gallery on the wall, I called these arrangements "Information Stacks," and they can be arranged in many different ways depending on what elements I want to display of my dissected Chicano identity. The elements were in the gallery as my way of displaying what I was extracting from my old Chicano identity in my attempt to create my new anonymous Internet identity. This exhibition worked on a few different political levels. On the surface was an exhibition by a Chicano artist who was describing how to rid himself of history and culture by integrating his identity into the anonymous world of the Internet and the World Wide Web. But what I was really working for was an exaggeration of what was expected of me at CGU, and that was to rid myself of all references to race and culture in my artwork so my artwork could easily fit into the general art market. This is what I was told, so I created the perfect recipe to achieve this goal, or so it seemed. Fortunately, I am old enough to know better and I have been making artwork for over twenty years, so it is really impossible for me to give up my cultural references that easily. On a different political level, what I was working for in this exhibition was a way to create a new type of Chicano art, very conceptual in nature but at the same time full of art historical references that could reach back in time before modernism–that is, anything before the Impressionists. If I was really going to reach back in time, I wanted to refer to the Early Renaissance before the Spanish Conquest of Mexico. What I was aiming for was a kind of artwork that tried to minimize the influence of modernism and referred to early painting styles and art, but at the same time have contemporary digital and Internet art as its main influence and contemporary Chicano culture as its core. The Burden of History Project is not what it seems; if you look closer it is very Chicano and full of humor. Most of my latest work looks historic and academic, but just under the surface it is more complex with humor and mixed metaphors using traditional techniques as a conceptual element. You can see this Internet project on my website http://www.elpayaso.com and click on The Burden of History Project button.