POST 3 - LESUER INTERVEIW & UNDER THE INFLUENCE - DEE DIAZ

Interview Questions:


Who was your most important teacher?

My most important teacher was my 3rd grade elementary school teacher. Up until that point I was always trapped in my own world day dreaming and often unruly when I was interacting with others. Her motivation in my creative writing gave me an outlet for not only the things others saw as weird but also for the strong emotions I had felt at a young age. From then on, I was interested in making stories and reading as much as I could get my hands on.


What is your favorite artwork?

My favorite artwork is Rest Energy, a performance piece by Marina Abromovic because there is an inherent romantic and yet cynical quality to the piece. We are meant to be afraid for the two performers because they take turns pulling on this arrow meant to symbolize love and trust and aiming it at the other’s heart while they pull the bow. I enjoy this piece because it is intense and it is a physical representation of what it feels like to love someone; you give them the trust to break your heart.


What artist influenced you most?

This is a difficult question for me because I feel there are several artists that have influenced me. But if I had to pick only one, I would say that it is Duane Michals. His work is simple and yet it has this inherent sense of thinking outside of the box in order to create complex narratives that challenge themes of death, identity, and transformation.


What exhibition has had the most influence on you?

The exhibition that has had the most influence on me has been the Vivian Maier Unseen Work that was held in Fotografiska in New York. The works of artists that did not live to see their work being loved and appreciated has always been interesting to me. Similarly my favorite painter is Vincent Van Gogh because of how abstract his work is and how tortured his life was. Maier’s work is profound, showing thoughtful glimpses into her life and others around her.


What is your favorite museum?

My favorite museum is the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). There is something for everyone to enjoy at the MoMA because of the great variety of works that are exhibited there. There are spaces for you to walk through and observe, such as one time I went and they had a 1950s fallout shelter for you to walk through with different instructions on how to survive on the walls. There are also various sculptural, video installations, paintings, and more throughout the entire museum that change frequently.


What book has influenced you the most?

The book that has influenced me the most has to be a book that I never even finished but managed to fall in love with. That book that I attempted to read at 12 years old would be Welcome to Night Vale by Jeffrey Cranor and Joseph Fink. in this series we are shown a strange town called Night Vale where nothing is as it seems and once you enter it, there’s no way to leave. For me books and series like this have always made me feel at home with the weirdness I held inside of myself.


What other creative fields/disciplines influence you?

Other creative fields/disciplines that influence me are most obviously creative writing and poetry, but I also enjoy listening to music, painting, and playing sandbox video games. I enjoy writing short stories that are usually sci fi or horror; poems that are often about love, depression, loss, and acceptance of self; I listen to mainly indie, pop, and a mix of rap/r&b music; I like to paint abstractly often with a brush but sometimes finger paintings; and finally I like to create buildings and sometimes pixel art or places in sandbox games like Minecraft, Terraria, and Lego Worlds.


Have you ever made a choice that was influenced by someone’s critique or feedback?

I have begun to take my digital works and put them into the physical world as vandyke and cyanotype prints because of a recommendation that my professor made to explore my collage work in a different medium.


What advice would you give to an aspiring artist?

Advice that I would give to an aspiring artist is that even if you are not creating now there is no shame in that. Continue to take notes and pictures of any ideas that you have or things that you find interesting. These will be your tools to create when you can find the motivation to do so. Always be thinking creatively and don’t be scared to just create something.



Le’Andra LeSeur by Ksenia M. Soboleva / BOMB Magazine:


What inspired LeSeur? Compare what motivates you to create meaning.

LeSeur is inspired by their experiences primarily around 2017 with the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement coming to the forefront, and this movement pushed them to create a dialogue with the audience that was more than just pushing trauma onto the audience. She was trying to acknowledge that she is more than just the perceptions and stereotypes that are thrusted on her, and she did this by creating work with silhouettes showing multiple facets of her inner self.


What motivates me to create meaning in my work is the lack of representation for people that look like me in popular media. While there is a rise of representation in pop-culture a lot of it plays it on the safer side; the background character or the best friend is gay, and when it is in front of us, it is in a way that feels almost too clean, too palatable. I want to create work that shows that being BIPOC, being queer, having intense highs/lows, is all normal and it doesn’t mean you are alone.


How does your choice of material, process, aesthetic, content, etc. reinforce your message?

I choose to work in multiple mediums because like my work there are multiple facets of my being that can be shown in various ways. Through collage there is both an overlap and a unity of form that shows difference between subjects and yet comparison as well. The aesthetic and content that I try to portray is that of a diary or inner self; you are somewhere where everything is familiar and yet at the same time somewhat unsettling or overwhelming, and it is as if you are in someone else’s mind.