Aggression masking intimacy

Sam Guerrero takes guy-time very seriously. An artist and teacher, Guerrero is completing his Master of Fine Arts in studio practice at Portland State with his upcoming exhibition, Stop Crying.

The exhibition, held in the Art Building’s first floor AB Lobby Gallery and the second floor MK Gallery, will be on view through Tuesday, April 24. Guerrero will also be giving a lecture about his artistic process in the Shattuck Hall Annex Tuesday, April 17.

The first floor area will have a Hispanic theme, showing videos of Guerrero wearing piñata heads to express his cultural heritage. Guerrero grew up in Los Angeles, and although his father is fluent in Spanish, Guerrero himself does not speak it.

The second floor gallery features his piece “Lost in Translation,” an animation inspired by airplane emergency pamphlets. The piece shows men shaking hands, high-fiving, chest bumping and fist bumping. It shuffles the images of the people around, mismatching the different actions together for interesting and often funny results.

Similar to “Lost in Translation” are two energetic-looking drawings that are jumbles of snapshots of two men wrestling, put together to create a circle of tangled limbs. The exhibition also includes a video of Guerrero being slapped by his friends, as well as another animation titled “Confessions,” which features various men’s stories about their penises.

The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Vanguard: Tell me about your idea behind the show.

Sam Guerrero: My research has been into male relationships, and in the last two years I kept finding myself being drawn to physical interactions, and more specifically the masking of intimacy through aggressive interaction. Growing up in Los Angeles, in a mixed Hispanic culture, there’s an idea of brotherhood. For you to be an actual man, you have to remove as much femininity from you as possible. That always conflicted with my sensibilities.

VG: What do you like about art?

SG: Art for me has always been therapeutic. It’s probably cliché, and probably what every artist will say, but growing up I felt like I didn’t fit in. I was a weird kid. Art was an escape for me. It’s one of the things that I was always good at. And there is something about making with your hands. I grew up in this environment where there was value in what you could do with your hands and in making a living off of making things. It wasn’t just that you were doing this for a paycheck; there was a satisfaction that came with it. To have people see what I’m making with my hands and find value in it, that’s really nice.

VG: These photographs that were the basis of these drawings…How did you take them?

SG: These are all studio mates. I wanted to test these relationships by creating these situations that are not normal in our dynamics. I instructed them to wrestle with each other, and when they were going through this struggle I would hold down the shutter and take a lot of photographs at once. The body posture and the body language that’s being created is very aggressive, but if you look at their faces they’re smiling and trying to hide this laugh. This very aggressive act masks the intimacy that’s happening. They’re very close, and this is very intimate body-to-body action that’s happening here.

VG: How and why did you shoot this video of you being slapped?

SG: This is a video that I shot during my bachelor party. We were all hanging out in this condo in Lincoln City. I said I wanted to film something for my work, and I asked them to come up one by one and slap me. They agreed, and as it progressed there were jokes being made, and they started getting more creative and hitting me harder, and I became less and less happy. I thought that was interesting. As I was just going through the footage, you can hear in the background that it’s bothering them but not enough that they’re going to stop.

VG: What do you hope the average PSU student takes away from your work?

SG: A lot of the work is very guy-centric. So guys will find it familiar. But what I’m really hoping is that I’ve injected enough peculiarity into it that they’ll start to look at it and question why a lot of this stuff is normal. I think that when we don’t question things that we dismiss as very small, they can very easily lead to things that can be very important and can be very harmful that we don’t question, that we just accept and go along with. I think there are a lot of things within our culture that we accept as normal that are not normal, and there should be dialogue around it.

Yes, there are a lot of males and a lot of guy stuff that’s happening, but it is about relationships, and that is not limited to one sex. I’m sure there are things within woman-to-woman relationships that are just as easily accepted and odd, but I’m not a woman so I’m not going to make assumptions that I can understand the female psyche. I can barely understand the male psyche. But we’re both people, we’re both humans, and it’s not just a sex thing; it’s a human thing.