I am from a generation that was raised with the Internet….with a different kind of television and music…for example that depends very much on borrowing from different traditions, sampling pieces of other music and overlaying different rhythms and melodies and I think that is reflected in my…
(Jonathan Safran Foer in an interview on identitytheory.com in 2003, age 26)
Maybe you think Karlos Carcamo said this. Well he didn’t. But he might have.
What he does say is:
I use the constructed nature of hip-hop culture as a resource for the production of my work. Visually and conceptually, sampling, cutting, re-mixing and re-contextualizing work similar in method to the way a DJ produces music.
(Karlos Carcamo)
The story goes that when the writer, Jonathan Safran Foer was 18, he had no idea what he was going to do with his life until was given a green light to become a writer by his college professor, Joyce Carol Oates.
And anyway, Karlos says he had no idea he’d become an artist, until his high school teacher encouraged him to think about it. He moved to Florida, took a few courses in Miami, did pretty badly, saw a Pop Art show at the University Art Gallery, which included Robert Rauschenberg’s “combine paintings” , drove to Pearl Paint where he got a job, poured through books and magazines on his lunch break, looking for information and clues about the contemporary art scene, and there it happened, he claims: “fire was ignited” So, back to Queens he went, studied both painting and art history at the Art Students League, the School of Visual Arts, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and Hunter College. ”Hip hop became my vocabulary”, Karlos explains. Trailing behind this focus is a whole mess of words, concepts, influential artists and teachers. Some he studied under, like Bruce Dorfman (assemblage painter) Robert Farris Thompson ( One of the world’s foremost authorities on African and Afro-Atlantic cultures at Yale) Glenn Ligon (African-American multiple media artist “exploring issues of race, sexuality, identity, representation and language.” Some just fell into place like everything hip-hop, cultural icons, literary and urban culture, Sugar Hill Gang, Michelangelo Pistoletto , Octovio Paz (Nobel winner from Mexico City, poet and essayist dedicated to arts and politics, 50 cents (U.S. born rapper Curtis James Jackson III from Queens check out www.50cent,com).
Moments prior to getting in my car destined to an “interview” with Karlos Carcamo, I finished Foer’s novel, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, and then drove to Karlos’s totally cozy, eccentrically shaped home in Wappingers Falls. I’m still a bit caught up in this book in which the main character, Oskar, a 9 year old is searching for just about everything: a dad killed in the WTC on 9/11, his personal identity, the meaning of rules, an antidote to the guilt he feels for not picking up the phone when dad called from a cell phone. Like every other artist I know, Oskar will do anything to get it right and find some answers – to protect his need to keep searching for whatever it is he keeps searching for: “It’s not safe when you’re mad at me” so he makes things up, and then you won’t be mad at him. As if the novel is still unraveling, I meet Karlos - an extremely bright, incredibly canny and gifted artist seeming to stitch urban life complexities into visual arrangements, bringing it all together. Looks like there could be a beginning and an end, but I think really good art doesn’t necessarily do that. What I mean is this: The beginning is way before Karlos’s time…and history tells us, there is no end…unless… The artist is grabbing at passages, the ones he lives with, the ones his mom and dad lived with both in El Salvador in their upper middle class life and then in Queens in their not so upper middle class lives. Karlos reinterprets, plucking ideas from urban streets and alleyways, from lives of laborers, from Latino culture and hard working class folks who want their children to become doctors or lawyers. Then the artist frames it, mounts it, binds it between two covers or maybe stages it. Gets it to his gallery. Or gift wraps it, presenting it to mom and dad or sister, for her birthday. That part doesn’t really matter.
Back to Karlos Carcamo’s work where he makes newspaper jackets and baseball caps (an art installation for a Latino Cultural Festival in Queens) to “remind (you of) the importance of the immigrant labor force in America,” Or take his rapper series and work titled Cut Out, loaded with references to Michelango Pistolleto and Arte Povera, on an image of a 50 cent poster, with the person’s face (identity he was born with) removed with only his possessions or jewelry (identity he purchased) remaining. And, anyway, what do these found objects in Carcamos’ work mean? Autobiographical? His newspaper. Our working people? Our Queens? Our people from Latin America? Our garment industry? I think I’ll take a better look at this cool looking shirt I’m wearing? How much an hour? What?? $6.00 per hour. 12 hour days? and (Oh, Lord) no health benefits?
But, no matter what, he is an artist, even when he is getting paid as an Art Handler, or co-directing the
Go North Gallery in Beacon, or connecting artists to himself and to each other through shows, or teaching at ABACA in lower Manhattan, an alternative public high school serving students throughout NYC, building “self-esteem through experiences of success in the arts.”, cleaning up alternative spaces for exhibition, or organizing ART EXCHANGE at School of Visual Arts, inviting artists “to come up with ideas for exhibition.”
Go to Maykr.blogspot.com/ where Karlos Carcamo posts a ton of stuff he’s involved with, including images of his work and many other regional artists, evidence of his significant role towards creating art and community opportunities in our Hudson River region, from Queens to Beacon.
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