Douglas Diaz
This work is a refuge of sorts. On the one hand, it serves as a place for safe explorations into questions about my own humanity. A place to challenge my innermost fears, the darkness that lurks in the shadows of my being. As such, I attempt to exhaust a topic, an insight or a thought that appears after a short zazen.
On the other hand, my refuge takes shape after the drawings are done, in the collective body of work that is building over time. While I fail at sitting and manifesting daily, the overall work that is being generated becomes a new path for living. In it, I find new insights and habits that are played out over days only to fall back into questioning on the next session.
I attempt to keep in check the self-indulgent nature of the work, through the rigor of the questions, the dedication of sitting and the honesty with which I ask myself hard and easy questions, as well as the lack of boundaries of the exploration.
The visual elements of the work are deliberate attempts to simplify the means in order to produce an honest questioning. The markings are evolving to become more direct, shortening the preamble to arrive at the most vulnerable insight at any given moment.
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These horizontal line works are about collective history and how if we know a history – like me knowing that my arm moves across the page in a certain way – how do we resist it or succumb to it.
The repetition is like trying to overcome it and rewrite it.
— Douglas Diaz
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James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time inspired three works in this series that each take a quote from the book that express my desire to take flight from a preordained narrative and propose something new.
The colors of these works are intentionally extracted from the American flag as a kind of commentary on being marginalized from the American discourse.
— Douglas Diaz
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When identity is constructed through memory, it’s condensed and packaged in a way that, while it has flaws, it’s untouchable.
I thought, am I this accumulation of memories within a historical framework, or do I get to choose who I am in the present moment?
— Douglas Diaz
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‘That Time in Bali’ is based on the feeling of being with my beloved in the ocean – this incredible feeling of the sand beneath my feet and the way the water hits my body I was trying to capture where my heart and mind were at that moment, but through what I’m experiencing right now.
As the work is unfolding and I’m paying attention to the emotions that come up.
— Douglas Diaz
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My techniques and movements for this series were an outcome of my questioning of new ideas about memory.
I had to spend some time just getting rid of old movements and figuring out new ones.
— Douglas Diaz
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I chose the title in Spanish because Memorias is a feminine noun. For me, the feminine has something to do with creation.
When we tell a memory from the past, we are creating it in the present.
— Douglas Diaz
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