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San
Francisco Examiner
Searching for the perfect moment, by Anne Crump
May 18, 2001
Claudia
Valdes was born in Santiago, Chile, and moved to the
United States at age 3. While studying at University
of California, Berkeley she pursued both dance and
painting before ultimately settling on fine art.
Upon
graduation, she worked for an auction house, assistant
taught high school art classes and traveled before
taking an administrative job with a finance company.
Three years later, working as a stock trader, Valdes
decided to devote herself more completely to art and
enrolled in Berkeley's MFA program. She graduates
this spring.
Valdes'
work will be on display at the Berkeley Art Museum
tomorrow through May 27 in the university's graduate
exhibition.
GETTING
STARTED
I've always been into art. I think I was in the state
fair when I was about 5 or 6, finger-painting or something.
Mostly I got into it seriously when I was (at Berkeley)
as an undergraduate student.
I
initially came to Berkeley to study architecture.
I did that for a year and a half and decided that
there were too many rules that I had to follow and
switched over to art. Concurrently, I was doing performance
-- doing dance in the dramatic arts department.
I
felt like I was excelling in dance, then the art would
suffer. And when I started feeling like I was getting
somewhere with the art, then the dance would suffer.
I just felt like if I wanted to get anywhere -- with
anything -- I needed to choose. I kind of laid dance
at the altar of art.
(Later)
I found myself at another kind of crossroads and decided
to come back to school and leave the whole world (of
finance) behind. Emotionally it felt riskier to stay
in finance than to do the art thing.
I
lived in kind of a warehouse out in Potrero Hill.
I built my room in the warehouse -- learned how to
put up walls -- and had a fantastic studio.
ON
MEDIUM
Almost a year ago I started investigating video, and
that was pure video, not with any painting. It's a
very circuitous path how I got around to integrating
both of them.
I
had been working from photographs in my painting for
forever, and I started wondering if the photographs
were influencing the way I was approaching painting.
So, I started doing a lot of reading about photography
and how photography came to be at the time when it
did and the kind of questions people were asking then
and the nature of photography and some more philosophical
kinds of inquiries.
ON
THEME
Then I started thinking about the nature of painting
and the nature of video and all of the relationships
to time that each medium has. What I'd been investigating
-- and what I was doing before in painting -- was
time and memory, and it occurred to me that I needed
to bring these two kinds of times together to create
a present time in synthesis with a past time and have
a different kind of dialog going on.
It's
not like I was depicting time in any sort of symbolic
pictorial way. It was more just about my process and
the imagery that I was using -- and working primarily
with family photographs, photographs of my grandparents
and my family in Chile.
I
was thinking about time in relationship to my grandparents
and to the time in between seeing my grandparents
and always wondering if it was the last time I was
going to see my grandparents, if they were going to
die. So they kind of embodied a very special kind
of time for me.
That's
primarily how I was thinking about it.
REALIZING THE IDEA
It's developed into where I'm using the duration of
time, like with the projections, and then the time
in a material way, like the time it takes to do a
painting, as well as the juxtaposition or synthesis
of materials.
When
I was primarily doing painting, I would create these
abstracted spaces and then the image became the point
where a kind of paralysis would occur for me in my
process, where it had to be the perfect image, it
had to be the perfect size, it had to be in the perfect
place.
Now what's happening is the image is the first place
that I start since the image is in the video. And
the video has to be just right before I can find a
place to put it, which is what the painting is or
the canvas or the painting on the wall.
I've always been working with juxtaposition of abstraction
and figuration in my painting, and it just feels natural
to keep working in some kind of juxtaposition, whether
or not it's an imagery thing or if it's an actually
a physical, material thing. It's just something that
feels right for me.
CREATING AN EXPERIENCE
I'm still really interested in painting and the possibilities
of painting. I like to think about what I'm doing
as a new kind of painting as opposed to I 'm doing
a video thing and then adding a painting to it. I'm
not using video in any kind of real time way -- I'm
not feeding live imagery -- nor is it seen in the
dark like a video or film piece is seen.
I'm still interested in having it operate it as a
physical thing in reality, like a painting does, and
having there be a kind of suspension of reality for
the viewer in the way that they would experience a
painting.
It's actually gotten me thinking a lot about space
and how people experience space, as well as the pieces
and how I'm arranging the pieces in the space. I suspect
that I'm moving toward installation with my work --
painting on the walls, painting in a way that's starting
to reference architecture and controlling the light
in the space.
ON TRANSIENCE
Not only is it a temporal medium that I'm working
with now, but the whole thing is becoming a temporary
thing, as well -- at the end all you have left is
the tape. It'll never be the same.
It's
a completely different way for me to work. One of
the reasons why I decided to leave dance and pursue
art is because I wanted to have that thing at the
end of my process, whereas with dance, you do the
show and then it's over and it's gone. When I was
doing just painting with a canvas, at the end of the
process you have this object that you can say, for
one, lasts forever as a physical thing; and then you
can say, "Look, here, this is what I've done."
I'm finding myself back in this really ephemeral territory
where there's almost nothing at the end of it once
you paint over the wall or you take the projector
away. I don't know how I found myself back in the
same place that I was initially really afraid of,
but it is kind of liberating to just accept that there's
this moment that came together and now the moment
is gone.
And the moment was fine just being a perfect moment.
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