Website: www.victorcartagena.net Email: vstudio@mindspring.com Print version: download

Studio: Project Artaud, #101, 499 Alabama, San Francisco, CA 94110

Workshops and Events

From the SOTA Workshop

Student Comments:

Response Poem to visit at Victor Cartegana's Studio

impressive antiwar bravado
he perceives awareness of
our subconscious genocide
perpetuated through political liars
who prefer using the back door

juvenile warfare gets off on
toy propaganda manufactured
for ages 2+
due to small removable parts.

maybe we should stop dispensing
underage
under prepared
under funded
underwear.

- Victoria Solari, Creative Writing 2007

After the Day Inspired by Victor Cartagena

After the day
I come home full of sloshing water
Murky and hot like
A brew of concrete jungle
And somehow
There are rocks from the river

Fresh
from the river, cold-dripping
Black stones, they
Glisten darkly, hard and sure, cool-smooth like the river, they
Overflow my home to its brim

And crackle loud against each other and roll
River-rush,
Within the walls of my home, bursting
Pregnant-
.........Cornucopia, delightful

So I open my door and
In me
I let them spill until
at last
I am a real river once more.

- Natsha Weidner, Creative Writing II 2007

Victor Cartagena takes cultures of culture. He takes newspaper, he snips, he picks out the things that matter. Like a doctor with a needle, testing, probing, concluding, Victor slices up the world. He pastes it all on canvas, so we can all see what he sees. He spreads it all across a notebook confining everything to pages. Everything framed. Just one example of the way the world works. Just one example of the human race. In fact, that's what art is: a culture of culture. While writing is both expansive and inclusive, it's also specific, it is limited. Some things apply to everyone, some cells show up in every culture. Lies, love, family. Victor Cartagena recognizes that. He exposes those truths, repeatedly: funs, lies, children, violence. He takes a culture, a small portion of something whole, and then repeats it. So this excerpt feels like a whole. It's deceptive, easy to forget that there is good too. This is just a culture. Some people don't lie, some people don't shoot each other. There are other truths.

In his studio we are surrounded by faces watching. He created these faces; he put them up there to see us. It's eerie the way all of our own faces watch him, watch each other. Our profiles match the ones sketched on his canvases. It is appropriate we are mirrors of the world. It is ironic, it is frightening, but art is supposed to be truth, we're supposed to identify.

- Gia Harris, Creative Writing II 20