Photographic Sculptures with Alina Fresquez Patrick
Produced by Worlds Through Minds founder, Macy Castañeda Lee
- Name, age, where are you from, what format you like using, what are you currently working on if you are?
My name is Alina Fresquez Patrick and I am a 25 year old artist from New Jersey with family roots in New Mexico. I am an analog photographer and I love using medium format and large format film. Currently, I am working on a series of photographic sculptures using ceramic clay pieces and cyanotype. I am excited to be teaching a class on this process at ICP in May!
- What about your surroundings/environments and upbringing interested you?
I grew up in Summit, New Jersey, a town that is fairly similar to any TV caricature of suburbia; it has white picket fences, a good football team, families trying hard to be "perfect," and an excellent diner. As a kid, I heard stories from my parents about their upbringings in New Mexico, where both sides of their families had lived for generations (on my mother's side since it was Mexico). I grew a romantic attachment to that land and the very different experiences both my parents had living there. This inspired my first book, How to grow una flor en el desierto, where I photographed my first return to New Mexico as an adult combined with collages of archival images from my parent's family albums and a collection of poetry I wrote about my family history there.
- When was the first time you met photography? How did you feel when you met it?
I was extremely lucky to have a darkroom in my high school and the first time I printed an image there I fell in love with the medium. I remember thinking it was the first time I thought I could be good at art.
- Tell us about current projects you have been working on (could be any, or just work you have been doing in general). Is this story inspired out of personal reasons, or others? What are you most excited about in these projects?
Recently, I have been working on another photo-poetry book called Ordinary Devotions. This project combines surreal portraits/self portraits of myself and my partner, Noam, with sonnets I wrote. Essentially, it is about love— its uncertainties, the messy gray it asks us to live in, and how over and over again it proves us wrong. I was driven to make this project by a symbol I could not get out of my head; the relationship between figs and wasps. In the wild, fig trees do not produce ripe fruit until a wasp enters an unripe fig and dies inside. I was fascinated by the way the tree and the insect alternate between predator, prey, and neither. Their relationship resists a predator-prey binary — one which I struggled to escape within the vocabulary around intimacy after sexual trauma, forgiveness between parents and children, and the end of unrecoverable friendships. Rather than run to the sides of victim/villain, right/wrong, righteous/damned, I tried to make images and poems that invite you to sit in the messy, honest gray where more than one story is true. As one of the poems demands: Show me a certainty that is not dangerous.
- How did you find your visual literacy? Why are you attracted to certain images more than others?
I found my visual literacy through reading and consuming as much photography as I could. I think books were the first medium I ever fell in love with. As a child, I would be content sitting and reading a book for five hours a day and my mind was alight with all the images I found in those stories. I became ravenous for novels and could not be found without a book in my hands. When I discovered photography in high school, the same thing happened. I watched every youtube video on the youtube channel The Art of Photography where a former museum gallerist discussed the works of major photographers. Then, I would check out photo books from the library. Over time, I found my sense of vision and observation was sharpening and I never stopped wanting to learn more.
The images I'm most attracted to are ones with a bit of mystery where it's not clear exactly what is happening. Also, images that are intimate. I don't mean that necessarily to mean nudity or being photographed in a personal space. Rather, I am drawn to images that could only have been captured by that photographer.
- Imagine meeting someone who is picking up a camera for the first time. What do you tell them?
Photography will teach you how to look if you let it.
