Interveiw with Misael Soto (http://artmusicfilmwhatever.tumblr.com/)
He is a talented young artist I met at SIGHT SPECIFIC: Explorations in Space, Vision and Sound at the Fort Lauderdale Museum of art
He felt present and had a warm handshake, to say I’m here and you are too.When we first arrived there was a woman standing against the wall as if communing with it .We found someone doing the same inside ,but with footprints on the back of his feet to indicate someone should lean against him. Claudia stood against him and taunted him, I thought it was some form of Buddhist prayer and thought it sacrilegious, so I put a note on his back that said, don’t touch me, ho!
“When I went into college I was going to do marketing. I went in fell in love with art and started to study art history. I didn’t really like anything, nothing really came at me and then just last year in May I went up to New York and saw a show. I saw a piece by Marina Abramovic, the seminal grandmother of performance art, and I thought I needed to try this. And when I did it just worked.”
“It’s very much about connection, and how humanity is disconnecting, more so recently and trying to mend that and focus on the now. The footprints in this piece are me trying to focus on that and get people to appreciate it.”
“I’ve been doing a series of works were I take something that connects people and subverting that and making it something that connects strangers. So I have a piece for my iPod called a splitter and people could pick a song and then we were the only people listening to it and I would just dance. ( Were growing up in an online digital age and were trying to connect to this realness and some of my work tries to get away from the digital but sometimes I put it together.)”
