It's my yearly wonder of why I publically showcase any sort of “serious” “artwork” again.

The feelings that I have towards “art”, especially Art (with a capital A) changes based on however I am feeling towards what I would consider older Art of mine. I consider Art as something that is more tolerable and acceptable in Art society. This would be anything that isn’t fan related or personal project related. Something that you can claim has a deeper meaning than what you see with a blind eye. Perhaps even Art connoisseurs can stare as if they know something and say that it has some underlying pedagogy that I never meant it to have in the first place, but I enjoy hearing it because I like the affirmation that people think more of my work than what I gave it.

It’s not that I hate this at all. I think there is a time and place for critique and dialogue and everything that having an art exhibition gives you. (It gives very little more, but sometimes you get paid under the guise of an artist). I’ve already had glimpses of that world during my media arts degree and it really depends on what kind of art you create that determines the feedback you get. Nodding your head thoughtfully is typically the answer. However something like experimental media including animation and film take a lot more to prove its worth to the overall mainstream community than a landscape painting. (Which does make me feel bad for landscape painters. I think all art lives in a context that deserves to be acknowledged if the artist chooses so and “simple” paintings deserve that respect too.)

I remember that during the opening exhibition of my culminated art residency (which is basically a place where you can solely create art generally based on the location where you do the residence, in case you are not familiar with them), there was a classmate who walked in and examined the vast amount of work me and my cohort have created. His response was then that he didn’t “get” the meaning of the entire show. Afterwards, I tried to come up with some sort of reason why this work was made in the first place and how it all came together.

The answer that I came up with was that this show, and my works at the very least, encompass the experience that I had going to a whole different studio for an entire month. It also encompassed my desire to experiment with cyanotypes, and my long held idea to create a project that touched on my local mall and how its renovations reflect the passing of time as well as a monument of a time long past.

Look, I get it. I understand that this classmate mainly does portrait photography and that that itself gives so much information already. To me it is like reading a nonfiction book that gives you the facts from the get go.

I’d instead describe the work that me and my cohort made as working as an overall poetry piece. They are fragments that to us hold great meaning because we saw each other work on each piece every step of the way. We spent a whole night figuring out how to organize the entire exhibition so that the pieces could relate to one another. There is careful planning and thought put into the works, no matter if it took the entire month to make a piece or a fun circumstance brought it to life. (We used a printed glass brick that was made as a personal experiment as a door stopper and it actually made it into a show with a title and all because…it was there! Inside the gallery!)

All this to say that there isn’t really anything wrong with treating your own art as being as serious and deserved of praise as the Mona Lisa. Take a page out of my friend Danny’s essay about [Art Being a Conversation], which puts to words how I feel about art better than I ever could.

I guess it’s my intense desire to curate a personal image that makes me grit my teeth when I see older projects of mine. (I at least want to change some work titles.)

It’s hard to keep old things up, especially when there are so many flaws I can see in them and when they aren’t so easily relatable like fanart or original character works. It’s weird art. It’s messy art.

When I think of who made these projects, I think about how I was still a teenager only coming to terms with his otherness and coming to adulthood that I didn’t necessarily dread but I was starting to notice.

It’d be a disservice to myself to burn all this work in a vat of lava.

Maybe selfishly I hope that all this work at least reaches someone, no matter how incredibly cringey it is to me.

Maybe to keep all of this up is to help dispel the great illusion that artists don’t just make self-recorded movies and videos and that their work isn’t just a passion project that somehow magically has meaning. When I put work into the project section of my site, it means that I want it in the context of being taken seriously! I want it to be serious.

It’s incredibly hard for me to take my own work seriously at times, but I am always touched when someone does the work to understand and look at it in that manner.

So another year passes again where I don’t delete all the projects I have. Hooray!