Nestor Armando Gil

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Know Their Names -- 3000+ postcards -- 2007-8   Know Their Names -- 3000+ postcards -- 2007-8

LJK -- continuous supply of embossed pencils -- ongoing   Acumen -- game board, box, and playing cards -- 2007

Azucar -- digital image from the performance 'Boca: Your Memories Are My Myths' -- 2008   Blow - continuous supply of paper balloons, light -- 2008

Incidents -- ink on paper 51 inches wide X 20+ feet -- 2008-9   Incidents -- ink on paper 51 inches wide X 20+ feet -- 2008-9

Incidents -- ink on paper 51 inches wide X 20+ feet -- 2008-9 (detail)

Vernon Twinburger -- performance, intervention, memorabilia 2008

Letter to 2050 -- video, pipe, sand 2008

Footprint -- sod, ski mask, yarn, surveillance video 2007

You -- video -- 2006/7

Sin -- 90 feet of syringes, beach, ocean waves 2006/7

Boca: Your Memories Are My Myths -- sugar, coffee, sand, tobacco 2007

Artists Statement

I produce objects, videos, performances, and installations, most of which deal in some way with the phenomenon and politics of memory. In projects such as LK and The Know Their Names Project, modest, multiple, transferable items (embossed pencils, postcards) are produced and distributed as memorials to the dead. Their ordinary appearance and function, the potential for these items insinuating themselves into the minutia of daily life as items in a drawer or stuck to a refrigerator, is central to their power as abiding reminders. Incidents, on the other hand, collects its information into a handwritten scroll. 4.5 feet wide by 20+ feet long, the scroll unfurls down a wall and rolls out onto the floor, stopped by a pillow where viewers can kneel to look more closely at the text.

The memory of an unknown thing, something experienced by many hyphenated Americans, and the politics of access that define the kind of relationship one can have with the distant ‘home’ as well as with the present ‘place,’ (the viejos called the US ‘este lugar’ – this place -- even as they extolled its virtues and their gratefulness to it) figures greatly in work such as Sin – without -- and Boca: Your Memories Are My Myths. Both projects look at how we can perceive and to what extent we can internalize the life of a place we have never known.

My process is highly collaborative, and I believe in ‘many eyes’ as ideal for creating and solving the challenges of the artmaking process. This desire for the work to be born out of engagement with the community around me is mirrored by interventionist strategies employed in LK and The Know Their Names Project, as well as in the performance/interventions Vernon Twinburger and Letter to 2050. Twinburger, a misplaced totalitarian, glad-hands and campaigns as the immutable dictator-as-public servant, Already Serving You; and in Letter, an apology is issued to tomorrow. Community informs the entire process of my work, from concept to completion.

I work to develop poetries of image, of function, and of interaction.