Artist's Avenue

UNM senior Aric Grauke is a highly creative yet logical builder studying architecture.

Taking a bunch of math classes this semester to fulfill his degree requirements, he has still found the time to design projects around the world and keep his brain oiled.

He said he's mainly a designer and especially attracted to textiles, chains and knots.

He's using layered paper cut-outs to make a series about the dinosaurs' extinction, which he correlates to our own impending doom. They're images of cloud-shaped bricks in front of a bright orange circle that moves closer to tiny dinosaurs with each image. The bricks relate to the heaviness of sulfur dioxide clouds.

Aric Grauke: This is a part of a much larger story. I got really into this idea about weird drawings from the Middle Ages called "Wound Man." They were these anatomical drawings that were made for physicians that have this picture of a man who has been skewered and bludgeoned by every imaginable sort of weapon. He has swords and hatchets and stuff sticking out of his head and his legs and his arms and his body and these sort of annotations that come off of it that tell doctors how to treat these different kinds of violences to the body.

Daily Lobo: So what does that have to do with the dinosaurs?

AG: I read this kind of amazing article about that. It's about armor and fortification and how armor is an inverse of the wounds. A fortified thing is a wounded thing, kind of. This article was about wounded territory or wounded space.

DL: So, is this wounded space?

AG: I kind of became obsessed with the dinosaurs as this kind of heavy, armor-plated, carnivorous thing, and I think it's also kind of amusing, this whole business about their impending annihilation. They're getting targeting by this Day-Glo orange meteor god.

DL: OK. Who really went beyond the call of duty as an artist and in terms of architecture?

AG: Well, I really like Marcel Duchamp.

DL: The urinal dude?

AG: Yeah, the urinal. But I like those little suitcases most of all. When he was exiled from Germany, he miniaturized all of this work and then built it into these elaborate little folded-up suitcases. It's like this precious, heartbreaking, nostalgic flower. It's all this sort of glistening, hinged, reflective, blooming explosion that folds up into these intricate little boxes. It's about longing. About desire. Folding.

DL: So he was an architect?

AG: I don't know. You've been much more interested in these delineations than me. As far as what is and isn't architecture or who is and isn't an architect, I mean, when it comes down to it, an architect is a really specific person like a doctor or something that has a license to practice all these things. I'm not an architect, though I am in architecture school.

DL: You're in architecture school, but you're not an architect.

AG: I mean, this is kind of a little rabbit hole we're in right now.

DL: Yeah, it's fun. What have you done?

AG: I did a project in my studio where all my models were made of wax and these thin sheets of mica. They were like these little delicate, hinged, kind of glassy-looking flowers that opened up, and they were outrageously delicate and light, like light as air. So when you hold them, they sort of quiver in your hand. That kind of thing that can barely be held, I guess, is what my project was about. It's about this sort of longing that I feel. They were representations of a sensation - like caressing something that you can't quite touch.

DL: That's so relatable.

AG: The project was located at the Very Large Array, which is that big electromagnetic telescope that's looking into deep space producing these pictures of what the ancient universe looked like. I'm just kind of interested in that desire for this thing that is so abstract. It's like longing for whatever it is that's out there, but you can't ever really grasp it. You can see it for a second, but then it's already gone. So it was about suitcases and folding and longing and packing and exploding, rupturing, heartbreak, like a bloody crystal.

DL: Anything else?

AG: I've been working on this project out of New York. It's called Le Cinq, like "the five" - the five fingers of the hand. It's a quarterly arts journal that is released on USB flash drives, and the sort of work that will be on these drives is open-ended as far as it can be movies or animation or music or any kind of interactive media or anything that would make sense to put on a USB drive. Outside of that, the project is also about kind of hand-crafted things.

DL: What do people submit?

AG: There's some music and animation and film and fashion design and other stuff, like a comic strip.