Andrew Ortiz: Art is from the Self

AO: In school we had an assignment to create little clouds. I vividly remember the color of my orange clouds that I glued on the piece of paper.

I went to San Francisco State University but dropped out in my third year. I was having problems with my seizures, not going to classes, and eventually my parents didn’t have the money to keep sending me. After I left college, my friend who worked at Otis Art Institute got me a job working at the dark room. There I got back to my photography practice. My friend convinced me to go to Japan with him for a couple of weeks to photograph. I modeled for him a lot there and at home. He was a very good printer, produced very tastefully done images that I used as an example of excellent black and white printing for my early classes. At that time, I was interested in street photography. I was inspired by Garry Winogrand who had barrels full of work - unprocessed film - when he died. He knew how to photograph people on the streets as they ARE, not just what they look like.

At one point, soon after I got married, I went back to school in northern California to complete my BFA and stayed to do an MA in photography. Later on, I decided I wanted to get an MFA so I could teach and ended up in Rochester, New York at the Visual Studies Workshop.

The digital tools that allow placement of one image on top of another. It shifted my understanding that photography can do more than simply depict an object. I started playing with Photoshop in graduate school in the early 90s but really started using it as my primary tool after coming to UTA and being asked to teach photo classes using it. With superimpositions, like you can see in my work that depicts a face seemingly inside a glass jar with another image serving as a background, you can create a story from multiple images put together (Sealed, 2011).

I was diagnosed with epilepsy before going to college. I was about 15 when I had a seizure for the first time – I felt what was happening to me was similar to what you can see in The Exorcist movie. Neurologists still don’t know why my seizures are happening. Eventually my work began to evolve to deal directly with my epilepsy and the imagery had to do with neurons, chromosomes, anything that was affecting and still affects my brain. EEGs -electroencephalograms are the foundation of my recent work. Over time, the imagery has become more abstract, and I look at a lot of painters whose work gives me useful examples to study.

Starting from the series “Measured Disorder” (2010) where I was trying to understand what was happening in my head and the medical interventions I dealt with, my imagery carries a lot of symbolism related to my brain and seizures. An image of a glass jar photographed against a window with light coming through it with scanned numbers and a small piece of chicken symbolically represented a brain tissue sample. (Specimen, 2010) In another series called “Blackbird Speaking” that is about communication difficulties, a work titled Cloud (2008) depicts a cloud on the head of the crow. It is important to me because it is talking about what is going on in my head – a cloud that is inside my head – it represents me. I am building an image like a puzzle, putting together symbolic pieces that form the story I want to tell.

We had moved around a lot before that – from California to New York to Texas. It wasn’t a culture shock because of the number of Hispanics here. When I came here, I was asked to be a part of CMAS (Center for Mexican American Studies) – the Latino cultural center here, and I was asked to be a CMAS Fellow, which was nice. Digital imaging that I had started exploring was relatively new here, and people didn’t know much about it. I did a series in my early years here called “Disconnection/Reconnection” that dealt with learning about my cultural heritage. I shared a lot of that work with the community then and since then.

I would hope that people recognize my digital work was something new and something that is important, even though it is different from straight photography.

To make as many pictures as I can before I say goodbye to the world. I hope to be around campus even after I retire. I am currently going up for emeritus so I can continue to use the facilities to make prints. So hopefully, you’ll still see me around.