Jay Roff-Garcia

http://www.linktr.ee/jrgarcia // @mugger404

Jay worked with Co-Lab Projects to realize the work shared here in Fusebox’s The It’s NOT Fair.

Title: Vuelca Mapas

Medium: Transmedia, Sculpture, and Installation

Description of the project: Vuelca Mapas is an experiential study of the search for ‘home’ and of belonging through an installation of audio-visual works of art. In search of home, belonging, and space. My question is, who or what can provide this? The self, the collective, or is it a result of the relationships we pursue? Is it a result of our self-perception and where we place ourselves within internal and external spaces?

World building on a personal scale, expressing my own story of migration, loneliness, and belonging. I don’t intend for this body of work to only tell my own story, rather it should serve as a structure in which the individual and collective experience of migration can be contemplated. My goal is to give the audience an inlet or viewpoint into this experience whether they share it or not.

Vuelca Mapas is a phrase I came up with to describe the coffee works on paper that I have been making as a daily ritual for the past 3 years. “Vuelca” is to incline, invert, dump, and spill while “Mapa” is the word for map or representational geography. The process of making these works is an ephemeral and purposeful act of spilling. I spill the remnants of my daily coffee (ritual) across scraps and pieces of paper, then add and remove the liquid as the pieces dry. My mind tends to treat these as borders simultaneously as natural and synthetic, the interaction between.

I am a channel. Reaching across sound, writing, performance, video, and installation my artistic practice functions to translate personal experiences into new perspectives, new ways of thinking, with an openness to challenge.

Video installation and sound are used for their ephemeral potential to create multi-sensory experiences that emphasize the immaterial and the synesthetic. These mediums conjure sensations one could naturally associate with memories, emotions, or the surreal. Projection, audio samples and loops, or what I refer to as tools of perception, are employed to highlight the poetic potential of space. With photography, writing, and video I am primarily concerned with using them as archival devices. This stems from my own fractured sense of time and memories. Videos, text, images, and sound recordings are edited and translated in order to construct a system of reference points in the otherwise flowing, oozing space of memory and perception. The edit and subsequent translation is an attempt to materialize the grain and fabric of these spaces, to question what makes them up and what makes them important. My past is a blur in constant motion, a force I constantly have to navigate. I find my grounding by archiving what I can and use that archive to layout reference points from which to build expressions.

Collaborators – Vladimir Mejia, Veronica Sanchez, Henry Smith, & the team behind Regreso a Casa

Bio: Jay Roff-Garcia is a Venezuelan artist residing in Austin, Texas. They were born in the state of Anzoátegui in Anaco, Venezuela in 1994 and immigrated to Austin in 2012 to attend the University of Texas College of the Arts. They received their BFA in Studio Art in May 2017, their practice is transmedia based and manifests in performance, sound, video, food, fermentation, photography, writing, curating and installation art. Jay is the founder and director of Ruido/Noise, a bilingual organization dedicated to showcasing and supporting sound art through public programming, online releases, and artist support. They also form 1/3 of the rap supergroup Hermit Kingdom as Mugger.

Acknowledgements – Michael Anthony García, Co-Lab Projects, Fusebox Festival, Museum of Human Achievement, Eastside Potshop, Sanford Art Services, and Ruido/Noise