Tom Lawson Interviews Monique Prieto

This is an excerpt, for the full interview follow the link.

Thomas Lawson: Let’s talk about the change that has come about in your painting these past few years. When you started, how you moved from the more abstract shapes of your earlier work to this new use of language as an image.

Monique Prieto: Right. A lot of it was a direct result of things shifting in the world; the invasion of Iraq was a real moment of crisis for me. I had already been slowly resigning myself, or giving myself permission to let things evolve for other reasons, bigger art reasons. But the whole movement towards war and my feeling unheard and ignored in the political process made it seem all that much more important. I decided I wanted to take a flying leap, just take a real risk. So part of the whole shift is actually a gesture of pure change, just saying, ‘how about change?’ Then once I had decided that I was going to say, ‘how about change?’ I wanted the change to make sense in the thread of the work.

TL: I must say that politics didn’t seem like an obvious component of your art thinking before.

MP: No, it was never an obvious component in the way that we know it can be. But politics have always been a part of how I relate to the world. I’ve always been conscious of things, and even more since bringing up little people. In the earlier work I had made some attempts to introduce that kind of content in a very sly or tricky way. Whether it gets there or not, I don’t know. But at least putting it there made me feel better. And I think it was the frustration of knowing that this was an impulse of mine and feeling that maybe this was not the right time to squash that because that impulse was being squashed so broadly. You know, I have my tiny little soapbox in the studio, and so why not let myself say something? Even though the new work isn’t overtly political in its text, just using language differently from the way I felt it was being used against us seemed like a good move.

Source: afterall.org

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