by Eva Dameron
Daily Lobo
The friction life exerts on a person can serve as the conduit from which art springs.
Or it can send a person on a multiple-state killing spree.
Artist Cruz Montoya chose painting over murder.
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"Instead of going out and killing somebody, I express myself through painting," he said. "You've got to get it out somehow."
Montoya is one of 12 artists in the themed show "Friction" on display at the Anderson Studio & Gallery. "Friction" features local and national artists. Montoya painted a cubist-style Pan, the mythological half-goat, half-man figure.
"I made him a little more contemporary or urban. You can tell with the jacket," Montoya said. "He's kind of like a rebel. I just wanted to bring him back."
He said Pan is relevant today because he's the god of density or forest, and we live in a dense world.
Curator Kingsley Anderson said he chose the theme friction because it was a concept that could be widely interpreted, and he had been hearing people talk about social friction as well as friction in relation to physics.
"What's fun is people come up with new things," Anderson said. "You think about social friction, but what about the different parts of yourself that are competing?"
Montoya's inner selves are competing.
"I do feel like a 'manimal,'" he said. "My very nature is animal."
He said there's a friction between the artist and the world.
"The world needs artists. The artist doesn't need the world because the artist created the world," he said. "That's truth."
Artist Thora Guinn said at 90 years old she still loves to try new things with her art. She made a digital print of Cream records and drew over it with white ink.
"I took the records outside and placed them on the driveway," Guinn said. "I took a digital picture, blew it up, and drew the dancers on top of that."
There are two types of friction in this piece, she said.
"If you play a record, you have an arm with a needle on it that goes around and around and picks up the sound - there is friction there," she said. "And there is also friction of the dancers."
Her other piece is a watercolor depicting plate tectonics.
"It's a watercolor concept of how the Earth might look as it moved," Guinn said. "One plate moves against the other and I have felt the friction in earthquakes. The Earth does move constantly under our feet. Sometimes it's quite an upheaval."
UNM student Sarah Rockett moved back to Albuquerque from New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. She has a small print in the show. It's taken from a photograph she took of a New Orleans cemetery full of huge mausoleums. She said they only have above-ground crypts because the ground is swampland.
"My idea behind this piece was to show the realistic view we have of these mausoleums and the reality of the dead being there," Rockett said. "I put in the image of the Madonna to kind of contrast that - like, the spiritual belief of what we want to see there, what we want to have there watching over these people."
Anderson said he didn't charge an entry fee for the show, but applicants had to write an essay explaining why their works fit the definition of friction.
"Friction"
Anderson Studio & Gallery
1423 Central Ave. N.E.
Runs through May 31
Free
