WRITING
My voice tangled behind my teeth as I struggled to speak amongst my peers. My younger self had never interacted with such a large group before, and kindergarten proved intimidating. Socially, others bloomed while I failed to perfect the careful dance of social interaction. This setback cast me aside from them, and I tried to drive out my voice outside the locked gates of my jaws for the longest time. In my scramble to communicate with others, I looked beyond the spoken word and found myself familiarized with a brand-new way of expressing my thoughts. I held the tools to speak in my hands – the pen and pencil. Since then, I have found my voice speaking a language able to transcend words. My first language was art. After another failed round of fighting to unearth my voice, I buried my head inside the empty pages of my school notebook. Thinking the paper would shield me from my inner confusion, that blank journal only began to bother me. As scattered crayons had laid beside me, I looked back to the blank pages, and something clicked. That afternoon, the crayon became my first friend. Waxy stripes in primary colors tinted the page to display previously concealed emotions. Red, angry crayons hashed the paper as unrestful zigzags. Blue squiggles waved across with overwhelming anxiety. Eventually, yellow, smiling faces poked through the remaining spaces. Although I remained silent vocally, I screamed, cried, and laughed in the notebook. The colors, the symbols, and the movement of my lines led me to speak everywhere. The world became my unlimited canvas, and soon all sorts of artistic mediums joined my self-expression journey. My anxiety, which had previously stunted my social interactions, was buried away after I colored and painted bridges to overcome it. Since discovering the crayon, each tool I studied taught me something new. For instance, the pen’s ink warned me of the permanence of my actions. Watercolors had revealed to me the hidden beauty found in unpredictability or chaos. When learning a new language, one expresses themselves more clearly with every new phrase learned. Similarly, artistic tools and materials work this way, providing me with mindsets to soak in and understand. With these tools, I desired to teach others what I had learned. My quick doodles thus matured alongside me to display intricate works that better reflected changing times. My eyes may have darkened with rings like graphite stains, but I still strive to remove the barriers that keep me from sharing the pure, unaltered essence of my thinking mind. The key that unlocked my voice was unlike any spoken language; I instead spoke through my love of artistry. Even though I grew older and learned to socialize, my sketchbooks still reliably captured my inner state. I truly admire how the artist, like a lightning bug, can silently initiate a spark that encourages others to illuminate the mysterious darknesses of our world.
"THE ARTIST"
The surrealist and audacious television show, Revolutionary Girl Utena, was released as a major surprise to Japan in 1997. At first glance, it seemed like any other anime within the ultra-idealized style of "shoujo" animation. Within the genre, you might recognize Sailor Moon, the uncontested champion of the romantic shoujo scene, inspiring countless other media with its gorgeous visuals and even progressive ideals at the time, upholding femininity as a powerful force not meant to be overlooked. Kunihiko Ikuhara, a director who worked on Sailor Moon, tried pushing the messaging further to touch upon themes of identity, gender, and perhaps how a patriarchal world might react to the strong will of the women in Sailor Moon. Yet, Ikuhara felt trapped by the studio's restrictions as the anime grew mainstream, and he decided to leave the project. Once Ikuhara founded his independent studio, Be-Papas, his determination to create something that would poke at hesitant society's unwillingness to confront itself culminated in the series Revolutionary Girl Utena. Now that's Avant Garde! What's Utena? Revolutionary Girl Utena's true story hides under classic 90's anime fluff by offering a veneer of sugar over the tough pills the audience is intended to swallow. Through the beats of a magical fairytale, Utena criticizes how roles are insisted onto people by a society afraid to engage with the complex human identity. Appropriately, the savior prince and helpless princess dynamic is a strong overarching theme within the show. Its presentation is not atypical to other stories within the trope, but under Ikuhara's direction, the dynamic mirrors the real-life patriarchal standards that have become suffocating for all people, men and women alike. Not to mention those who fall outside of it, like our main characters. Thus, Ikuhara successfully warps familiar storylines and genres into intense political messaging under avant-garde principles. Utena is a young girl whose life goal is to become a prince. She's unsteady on her feet, unsure about her own identity, and although she fights to be a prince, she cannot fulfill the role wholeheartedly, especially when she faces the princess she must fight for, Anthy. Silent, malleable, and a puppet of societal roles, Anthy consistently puts down others’ efforts to do anything except maintain the status quo, hiding her weaknesses by trying to stick to a script that she has no power to change on her own. Thus, the story and its characters take advantage of their insecurities, attacking Utena and Anthy at every chance to mold them back into the image of perfect, demure princesses despite how they've grown to love each other. The narrative zones in on Utena as the harbinger of revolution, proposing that the love she feels is dangerous only in the sense that it destabilizes society's toxic ideals. This is where the shoujo art style of Utena starts to evolve into something extraordinary. Intense bouts of surreal imagery, absurdist humor, and color symbolism create a dense visual puzzle that often frustrates audiences with its enigmatic approach to storytelling. Additionally, Utena ramps up its nonsensical nature over time, to the point that its hijinks start to appear normal, despite how strange, and at times incredibly stupid, they once felt. (For example, someone's food was so bad it made people's souls swap with each other. Someone turns into a cow. A kangaroo with boxing gloves suddenly appears, along with a boxing ring.) Ikuhara deliberately took this experimental approach because it complimented the risks he was taking to tell such a story where the themes would be heavily contested. Ikuhara argues with his visual allegories that although societal roles may present themselves as harmless, they have lulled people into a never-ending loop of monotonous rituals that slowly eat away at the human spirit, right at our desire to go beyond what's possible. In reality, if people looked at everything with fresh eyes, it'll all seem just as strange and silly as the humorous moments in Utena. We've just gotten used to them, and thus are unable to break the unquestioned loop, the endless cycle, the spinning circle without end, which may also be interpreted as a sort of revolution. Revolution vs Revolution. Utena tries to go beyond the status quo, but she fails. By pursuing the ideal of a prince, she will only twist the meaning of revolution back into one of turning in circles, perpetuating a toxic patriarchal cycle that will never reward her or others. She must instead realize her love for Anthy, despite being bombarded with expectations to fall back into standard societal roles, and flee with her to truly be revolutionary. Ikuhara again deliberately chose absurd imagery to also make us ask the question, "Is any of what's happening in this show even real?" And that's exactly the point! Nothing about Utena is real unless we believe in it, and nothing about the roles they must pursue is real either. Even animation itself is an illusion. Instead of trying to interpret elusive shadows directing us to perform in a tired play that works its actors to death, Utena urges us to go against the grain and escape the fairytale given to us at face value by the mainstream. Be groundbreaking, be avant-garde, be revolutionary!
"AVANT GARDE"
I don’t have a strong connection to my heritage. The parts of me that are Nicaraguan and Peruvian silently lay in my heart, like dull marbles without sunlight. Though, they are not abandoned, as I take care to pay attention to when they do roll and clink, those subtle reminders of where I come from. Those whispers of my cultural past are expressed in my art through themes of yearning. Typically, my pieces expose the fear I feel of holding an insecure identity, which feels something is always missing. When I eat authentic dinners cooked by my grandparents, or study the artwork they bring back from their home countries, I feel the hidden parts of my identity rise up. The excitement of having this connection feel strengthened is not something I can usually express. I don't know how to even start appreciating those aspects of my own culture except privately. So, my work often reflects conflict with my own emotions. Yet, I know my connection to my roots are weakened for reasons out of my control. War, misconnections, and assimilation all stifled my family’s chances to carry on the memories of my family lineage and the culture of my people. Feeling disconnected to history makes me feel incomplete, but holding onto emptiness for so long is impossible. Available to view on my sketchbook page of my website, I constructed a painting where I wanted to highlight the opposite of the void I feel: a tapestry of all the sorts of ways my family has helped me patch the holes ripped into my understanding of my heritage. I have my two cultures waving proudly as unique aspects of my identity because although I may not truly feel connected to my roots, I can form my identity with what I do have.