filmmaker/artist

juan carlos zaldívar

artist statement

Human relationship to physicality is at the center of all my work. So are the impermanence, transmutations and transcendences of the physical. I apply these concepts to spaces, places and bodies as well. The immigrant’s perennial reflection of his or her environment is always present in my work.

I love origami. I learn through deconstruction. I am deeply influenced by Butoh dance and by film animation (both of which deconstruct movement and time, respectively); the defining properties of negative space; the invisible. I am kindred to the work of the Butoh Company Sankai Juku, the film animators The Brothers Quay, sound artist Janet Cardiff and light artist Jim Campbell. Early surrealists, in particular Jean Cocteau and his sense of humor, have also influenced me. The conceptual pranks of Dalí and Buñuel in the 1920's were brilliant. I like chocolate cake.

I started my film career as a sound editor and designer. I love sound. However, during the last few years and until recently, most of my work has been silent, exploring instead the displacement of all the different elements of film (optics, performance kinetic sculptures, etc). As I begin to make films once again sound is an essential part of it.

I respect the defining properties of negative space; the invisible. I have been heavily influenced by science (physics and optics in particular); also by how these two elements are used in magic. I am interested in light, sound and magnetism, which move us in ways that may not be apparent. I find the interaction of these elements often have fantastically exciting outcomes. I believe humor is often he best tool to communicate complex ideas and concepts.

During the next year, my film work will explore the realm of transmedia, a fairly new concept, which pronounces that audiences are no longer passive because as inferred by the “i” in all of our modern technical devices, this new technology entitles us toto internalize story telling and make it our own. It appears that we no longer want to be told stories. We want to internalize and personify the narratives around us. During the next year I want to fuse my filmmaking with a form of storytelling that draws from my art practice and from new technologies to create larger narratives and filmic, experiential spaces such as my latest show Shifting Nature, which premiered at the Bernice Steinbaum Gallery and will travel in January 2012 to Florida Atlantic University and to the Burst Art Fair 2011 during Art Basel Miami Week.