Interview by Shirley Kaneda

Shirley Kaneda: Both your flat work and the work that are assemblages are spacial, yet hold illusion in check; that is they tend to be more optical, where the images are seen through a layer of frosted mylar that functions as a lens, creating a blurred image of what lies behind it. The interplay of focus and distorted, exterior and interior, surface and structure seem clearly to point to the notion of concealing and then revealing what is all ready open to view. This situation seemingly collapses or connects the forms, the phenomenal and the psychological together? Is this something you are interested in doing?
Ivelisse Jimenez: Yes, there is an insinuation of a congruence between the actual and the mental that is not definitive. In having to travel the space between the different aspects of the piece, the digestive process is slowed down.

SK: Where do you get your images from? Do they have any references to the outside world?
IJ: I take images form all sorts of different places, from perspectives of what I see around me everyday, to memories of a shape seen in an illustration. Eventually most of it is reduced to a limited shared vocabulary of forms. The negative spaces in my drawings are a point of departure to work with my variations of these shapes. I also use figurative images occasionally as another element of disparity.

SK: Is this connected to the fact that while you have two approaches to painting: one is traditional, paint on canvas and the other is collage where you put bits of plastic, tape and other colored material onto the surface? The latter is something like a bridge to the assemblages/ constructed works. But is it also a supplement to traditional painting in general? if so what do you see as painting's deficiencies?
IJ: One of my interests with collage is to include in the painting that which it is not. This old activity of cutting and pasting to the painted surface serves my interest in acknowledging different forms of perception and interpretation simultaneously. The use of these materials as painting also adds informality, impermanence and an element of deception, of discovering at close inspection, qualities that were not evident at a distance. I believe one is able to achieve an openess in one’s work, to the possibilities of intertextuality with the use of liquid material alone. It is a matter of choice, I think the literalness of the material adds to a physicality that is important in terms of the type of nuances I want to include.

SK: With these two different approaches to flat work, are you after a kind of synthesis or do you see each as doing something the other can't? Is this what you are getting at in the new diptych like works where there is a traditional canvas on one side and an assemblage of equal size on the other?
IJ: Even when the two approaches are not incompatible they are dissimilar units that can't be reduced to a whole. The experience of movement here is more one of vibration. Both interpretations side by side within equal amounts of space also neutralizes each other’s strength opening the attention to the interval.

SK: In which case how do you see them as functioning differently, other than physically from the installation work?
IJ: The effect is similar (compatible) in both parts as they indicate a third space that is not present frontally. In one case it is the imaginary space of the canvas, in the other it is the actual material (plastic) that produces the blurring. They converge and then diverge as both parts require different decoding modes and play a different tone (therefore the vibration). They both require a different reception at different times. The factor of the equal size and the square shape pushes towards a simultaneous absorption of both or being stopped by doubt.

SK: When you speak of "tone" and "vibration", these are terms often used in relation to music where autonomous sounds coalesce into a continuous overall composition. This can also produce conflicts which brings me to the question of the fact that there also seems to be an attempt to contain conflict within your work where the collage elements seem to put a check on the more gestural parts of your painting. The fluidity of brush strokes seems not to be able to remain being emblematic of freedom. Do you see your work as an attempt to reach a certain freedom by combining use of different materials and formats. Is this a conscious decision and if so, what does this freedom represent for you?
IJ: It is interesting to me how a statement said with fluency and assertiveness resonate as truthful even before the information is processed. The musical terms refer more to the action of talking and what happens when reflection and revelation is taking place. My intention is of escaping the fixed and allowing incidents inside the work to remain elastic. This reaction towards stagnation is not confrontational, it manifests itself in the play between distance and closeness around the elements in order to [see them well].

SK: Does this relationship between language and abstract imagery become an interplay within itself that becomes a subtext which in turn allows for the individual and sometimes conflicting parts to have an integrity and assertion of its own so that nothing gets subsumed by the whole?
IJ: The experience of approximation is important in the situations I present. Nothing speaks directly about language, but is in play between perceiving parts and making sense of the whole that my interest is established.

SK: Do you think that this ability to shift back an forth both stylistically and in terms of format to be something particular to your generation? Do you feel free or constrained by history and what other artists do?
IJ: I believe that if there is more tolerance and interest now to shifts in format, it is because the work is not judged upon by the media necessarily, but the material becomes a vehicle to what the work is trying to communicate. Style is chosen in terms of how viable it is to produce the impression that works in terms of intention and concept. There is a rediscovery of immediacy and an emphasis on the experience of the actual piece. The process has been reversed and now painting is taking from other media. While working within the same language of forms, the nature of the work is different. For me choosing an old media like painting emphasizes the deliberation with how perception and interpretation are to be considered. There are many factors around painting and its dual nature as object and a ground to be inscribed that are of interest in terms of how this interaction is ordered. I feel constricted, but I guess that constriction works in terms of the kind of questions I'm looking at.