We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Ismael De Anda III a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Ismael, so excited to have you with us today. So much we can chat about, but one of the questions we are most interested in is how you have managed to keep your creativity alive.
As an artist, I’m fortunate to be part of a creative artistic community. As a member of the artist-run gallery Durden and Ray, I have the opportunity to continually engage with a group of outstanding contemporary artists to keep me creatively stimulated. Through this organization, we participate in exchange exhibitions with art organizations from around the globe. Through this interactivity, I had the opportunity to present my work recently in Taiwan and Berlin. As a teaching artist, I also have the opportunity to communicate with future generations of emerging artists, keeping me in contact with a wide range of perspectives toward contemporary and future art possibilities. My upbringing at the US/Mexico Gateway and working in Southern California, where there is a convergence of the world’s cultures, is also an ongoing source of inspiration for me.
Great, so let’s take a few minutes and cover your story. What should folks know about you and what you do?
I’m an interdisciplinary artist. I received my MFA from CalArts. I use mutant practices, including digital photo-collage, drawing, painting, sculpture, installation, and interactive, site-specific projects. My work is inspired by my pluralistic upbringing on the U.S./Mexico Gateway and living in Los Angeles.
My personal concept of the mutant, a condition of unexpected evolution, was born from my adolescent reading of X-Men comics that featured mutant outsiders/anti-heroes whose special abilities set them apart, as well as my own Mexican-American ethnicity. The mutant refers to mixing of artistic processes and the potential of the multi-ethnic existence of those living in the U.S. in exchange with diverse world cultures as a blend of developing culture not yet forecasted. Often my works are site-specific, inspired by the communities in which they are created, using locally sourced materials.
Recently, my practice has expanded by collaborating with interactive media artist Eugene Ahn. In collaboration with Eugene Ahn, we have developed interactive installations incorporating augmented reality technology and aerial drone video footage. Together we presented our installation Mestizo Dispossessed at AOC F58 Galleria Bruno Lisi, Rome as a Satellite exhibition for the Pera + Flora + Fauna Collateral Event of the 2022, 59th International Art Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia, curated by Camilla Boemio.
Together with Durden and Ray, this February, I will be exhibiting work for the QiPO 24 art fair in Mexico City. In April, I will be participating in the Supermarket 2024 Stockholm Independent Art Fair with Durden and Ray. Also, in April I will be participating in Alternative Monuments | Monumentos Alternativos, organized by Carolyn Mason, Mara García, and Carlos Álvarez-Montero, as an international exchange of group exhibitions, together with OJO MX art space, based in Mexico City, intertwining photography with sculpture. For these events, in April, Durden and Ray artists will exhibit artwork together with OJO MX artists from Mexico City at the Durden and Ray gallery space in Los Angeles. In May, Durden and Ray artists will exhibit artworks along with the artists of OJO MX at the OJO MX gallery space in Mexico City.
In June, with Durden and Ray, we will participate in a collaborative exhibition at Rosalux Gallery in Berlin along with its gallery’s Berlin artists and artists from Mexico City’s gallery Nixxxon as a part of B-LA-M, an international exchange project/festival between non-commercial art spaces from Berlin, Los Angeles, and Mexico City starting in Berlin.
Also in June, Eugene Ahn and I will collaborate and present an interactive video installation, utilizing augmented reality, infinite zoom technology, and drone aerial footage, for the group exhibition, Arcade of Hypermodernity, organized by Vojislav Radovanovic & Jason Jenn, which will be featured at the Studio Channel Islands Art Center, in Camarillo, California. Eugene and I are also planning an exhibition with curator Lenka Sýkorová for Altán Klamovka in Prague in 2025, plus public lectures at Faculty of Art and Design UJEP in Ústí nad Labem.
Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?
– Studying at CalArts gave me exposure to art and critical theory, and how art can provide new ideas and new ways of thinking for a culture, interdisciplinary art practices, conceptual art, and engagement with an international art community.
– Studying kung fu, Taoist and Buddhist philosophy led me to develop skills toward maintaining resilience, confidence, focus, and trying to build upon my strengths.
– Inspiration from my Mexican artistic culture and heritage, exploring and celebrating pluralistic identities, and pre-colonial culture found here in the Western Hemisphere.
Don’t give up. A professor once told me, “The artist has a higher threshold for chaos”, which I interpreted that in art and life, there may be confusion or setbacks, but sometimes these moments can be ones for renewal or resetting perspectives or approaches in a new light. Mistakes or setbacks can lead to discovery or to take fruitful satisfying risks. Perseverance is the key.
What has been your biggest area of growth or improvement in the past 12 months?
The last 12 months provided a wealth of growth and improvement. Some highlights included a month-long artist residency at Siao-long Cultural Park in Jiali, Taiwan, which resulted in a two-person exhibition, Atmospheres of Influence, with peer Durden and Ray artist Valerie Wilcox, as part of an international exchange program. My mixed-media installation, Hyperpolyglots, utilized a range of painted wall silhouettes, signifying the shadowy marking and passage of time, as a consideration of Tainan’s 400-year history. My designs incorporated painted written phrases in multiple languages that have been used throughout Tainan’s history, including Taiwanese, Mandarin, Japanese, Dutch, and Spanish, that are also written in reverse and upside down, to explore how the evolution of regional languages and translations combine and shift as they shape the understanding, communication, and local identity within a community. I also used painted silhouettes of local icons such as the Sword Lion of Anping, Milkfish Boy, Koxinga, the Phoenix, as well as projected mutant shadows, cast onto the walls, emanating from rotating spot-lit sculptures, utilizing juxtaposed local souvenir statuettes.
Also as a collaboration with Eugene Ahn, we presented our interactive installation, Revolutions Generators at panke.gallery, in Berlin, organized by Sakrowski, with the support of artist, arts coordinator Carl Baratta. Revolutions Generators is an installation utilizing digital technology, investigating notions of territorialization/ re-territorialization/ de-territorialization, which intersects imagery from the U.S./Mexico Gateway where I was raised, incorporating augmented reality features and aerial imagery, including my ancestral family farm on the banks of the Rio Grande/ Rio Bravo River on the hinge of the U.S./ Mexico Gateway, and Berlin, organized by interactive media artist Eugene Ahn. Revolutions Generators incorporates elements of our ongoing project where re-imagined digital silhouettes of the metal turnstiles used at the U.S/Mexico point of exchange through augmented reality technology are transformed into antennae-like, satellite-esque, levitating forms that are symbolically, yanked out of the ground, removed as barriers, and released into the air as liberated, freely flying, spinning entities. This augmented reality feature allows viewers to superimpose flying “Revolutions Generators” anywhere in the world(s) through the lens of their phone. The Revolutions Generators augmented reality feature has been experienced in San Pedro and Los Angeles, California, USA, Mexico City, Tirana, Albania, Helsinki, Finland, Rome and Venice, Italy, Bath, London, and Stonehenge, England, Taiwan, and Kassel and Berlin, Germany. In Berlin additional augmented reality features also included flying, rotating, tractors mutated into spacecraft.
Last October I had the opportunity to participate in Nomad II, the second edition of the Torrance Art Museum’s innovative contemporary art pop-up featuring over 160 Southern California-based artists featuring a sculpture, installation, and performance-focused program. Alongside Nomad II, Tryst took place, a new alternative art fair for artist-run spaces and collectives, where I met members of Prague-based gallery Altán Klamovka, which resulted in members, curator Lenka Sýkorová and artist Darja Lukjanenko, paying a visit to my studio, leading to an upcoming collaboration.
In addition to these highlights I had the opportunity to share my work and participate in these events during the past year,
QiPO Fair 2023, Mexico City, Mexico; TIEZE, Durden and Ray, Los Angeles; Disparate Alleys, Gallery 70, Tirana, Albania; Alptraum, Polarraum Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany; Supermarket 2023, Stockholm Independent Art Fair, Stockholm, Sweden; Melting Furnace, Gallery Rankka, Helsinki, Finland; and High Beams #7, Cruising, Plummer Park, West Hollywood, CA.
Thank you to all my fantastic collaborators and peers for all our amazing adventures in the last year. I look forward to a new year of creative projects and collaborations. Wishing you all the best in 2024 and the Year of the Dragon!
Contact Info:
- Website: ismaeldeanda3.com
- Instagram: @ismaeldeandaiii
- Other: Durden and Ray https://www.durdenandray.com/#/ismaeldeanda/
Image Credits
1. Ismael de Anda III_photo courtesy of Siao-long Cultural Park_Jiali Taiwan 2. Atmospheres of Influence-Hyperpolyglots_photo courtesy of Siao-long Cultural Park_Jiali Taiwan_Ismael de Anda III 3. Atmospheres of Influence-Hyperpolyglots_photo courtesy of Siao-long Cultural Park_Jiali Taiwan_Ismael de Anda III 4. Atmospheres of Influence-Hyperpolyglots_photo courtesy of Siao-long Cultural Park_Jiali_Taiwan_Ismael de Anda III 5. Revolutions Generators_Ismael de Anda III in collaboration with Eugene Ahn_courtesy of panke.gallery Berlin 6. Revolutions Generators_Ismael de Anda III in collaboration with Eugene Ahn_photo courtesy of panke.gallery Berlin 7. Revolutions Generators_Ismael de Anda III in collaboration with Eugene Ahn_Stonehenge England_photo courtesy of Ismael de Anda III 8. Chuco-El_vinyl on metallic paper_24x18in._artwork for Qip0 24 art fair_Mexico City_photo courtesy of Durden and Ray_Ismael de Anda III
