 Hello from the Studio Guides at the Long Beach Public Library and welcome to Web Chat Wednesdays. I'm Chris and I'm here with Artie. Hello everyone, welcome to Web Chat Wednesdays. Our guest today is Jorge Mujica, who is an artist based in Southern California. He's the director and curator of Cactus, the creative arts coalition to transform urban spaces. Jorge, thanks for joining us today. Is there anything you'd like to add to your bio? No, not really, thank you for the invitation. I'm really excited to be able to speak with everybody at the studio, but also to kind of echo all the excitement that's been happening inside of the gallery, inside of the atrium of the gallery where my artwork was installed for a year. And so I really appreciate the invitation because it just feels like I'm back there virtually. And so that's really nice. Thank you. Awesome. Yeah, we're excited to talk about those installations. Jorge, do you remember one of your earliest experiences making art? Yeah, you know, I grew up in a really interesting family because my father was a photojournalist and my mom's side of the family has always been really creatively inclined. So I have like a few uncles that are artists and artisans and it's been interesting to see how some of that has permeated my own understanding of the world and my kind of the moments of life that don't require you to do work. To see my parents, my mom be a wonderful gardener, to see how creatively she handles different types of problems within that, or when we used to have dogs to see how she would troubleshoot like keeping the dogs in certain areas. It was artistic. And my dad's use of the camera, or as a photographer, allowed me to have a camera as a young kid. So I think I started taking pictures and seeing my mom cook and grow things. At the age of three, I think I have a really strong understanding of them doing that on a daily and influencing me to think about things creatively. That's a great idea. Yeah, it also led me to follow my dad in the summers because he was a photojournalist. I wouldn't have a childcare provider or anything like that. I wouldn't go to daycare or whatever. So I would travel with him and that allowed me to see the city and to see what journalism is. And I think because of that, I had a camera that allowed me to see composition and color in an urban space that impacted me. And because LA is such a drive to point A to point B place, you have a lot of corporate colors that pass by. So I think all of that started to permeate me, my understanding of color when I was little and sitting in the passenger seat. So you went to school for art and a couple of pretty well-known schools. Can you comment on your experience going to art school or just going to school in general and what are some lessons you had to learn outside of school? You know what, that's a real strange question to ask in this current time state because when my parents came to the United States and I was at the age of three, my parents came to the United States as a form of escapism because the corruption in Mexico was going to, they saw it go somewhere where they didn't feel like it was going to give a good place to stay. And you know what, they made the right call because a few years later, the economy and Mexico tanked in a really horrible way. And so when my parents decided to come, it was like within the breath of amnesty and allowed my parents to become American citizens. And by that path, I became an American citizen. And so I think I was going to go down a path that I escaped me. Artie, can you repeat the question? Yeah, I'll just read a word for word. You studied at Yale and Art Institute of Chicago. Are there any valuable lessons you learned in art school and what is something you had to learn outside of art school? So because my parents were immigrants, they imposed this value of becoming a professional and seeking education as a way to professionalize a career. And because my dad was a photojournalist, I pursued this more critical perspective of society and I studied political science as a form of understanding and how the civic gears of society moved into like develop my own understanding with the nuance. And so, so I have a bachelor's degree in political science. And then I wanted to get a law degree, but I realized that my aptitude was not going to allow me to be a strong lawyer because I don't have the propensity to sit and read for hours at a time. My brain has a different type of makeup. And so I decided not to extend my undergraduate experience and add another degree, which was focused on art and art history. But because that's such a strange mix of art history and political science in my undergraduate experience, I needed to find a program that would fit me in grad school because I needed to just get out. And like, I felt like I needed education was like the only way academia was the only way for me to aspire to change my my social or like, I don't know, for me to move into society. And so when I went to grad schools, I look for theory programs. And so I have a master's of arts in visual and critical studies from the Art Institute of Chicago. And it was really there that things really popped off. And what I can do is I can show you what I was making there that influenced me a lot. I'll show you a little bit more about what's going on over here, but there's some things that I'm more around. And so this is my studio community and I'll show you a little bit. This is a studio community with several different studios, different professional artists. And this is the studio room that I use and it has different types of projects that I have working on, other artists working. And so this is some work that I have going on. But when I got to the Art Institute of Chicago, I wanted to study the culmination of of minimalism and in sculpture. And that was something that was really interesting to me. And I wanted to see how I can interject with sculpture and minimalism to make interesting paintings. And what I was researching were minimalism by like Donald Judt. So these stacks were really important to me because they were clean. The way that it was installed, the walls don't have any holes. There's like a repetition. There's a precision. There's a real cleanliness to it. So like this type of aesthetic was really interesting and compelling to me, but it also felt like a really like tall white guy kind of art. And that didn't really work for me. That wasn't that wasn't the type of vibe that I was into. So I looked for a brighter colored art. And then I studied with with Peter Halley at Yale. And I really wanted to study with Peter because of all the people in the United States that were in academia. He was one of the people that had been making pop art and like this minimalist aesthetic and giving it really random or not random, but like interesting titles like Freudian painting, Prison of History, Stacks of Rocks. And they had this poetic political narrative that I thought was really interesting and compelling. So when I got the opportunity to apply to graduate programs, I applied to study with Peter Halley. And it was really wonderful because I went from making these types of paintings like which are looking at the frame of a painting and excavating the space between them and trying to make a painting stand in space. And so I was looking at different types of painters like Mikata Jima and she makes paintings that stand to have these really interesting wheels and they turn around. And I was just like, this is really sexy and it's really smart and it's elegant and it looks really good in gallery settings in the same way that, you know, this type of minimalism like John McCracken and these types of sculptures. And also related to, you know, things like Peter Halley. So these are really wonderful paintings made with roll attacks and dig low for us in paint. And they might have like pearlescent and they're two canvases stacked on top of each other. So they have like this really cool kind of composition. And so they have like Brinksmanship and they have like strange titles that remind you of like what a cell and a conduit is and how they're related to each other. So it had like this theoretical framework that was really appealing to me. But then at the same time, I was really interested in making works that was more attuned to what I was making. And I found some really interesting sculpture. This is this Dutch artist named Volkart de Jong. De Jong, I think I pronounced that incorrectly. But these are styrofoam, like pink styrofoam stacks that he cars into to make them. He's also like a graduate of the Reichs Academy, which is this really cool two-year art residency that is in Amsterdam and just like, has a really amazing artist come out of there. So just really cool stuff. I don't really want to make this type of work. I'm just inspired by it. And I find a lot of things that, about it really interesting. So I do these kinds of drawings. And these drawings are line drawings that start and stop but never overlap. And I realized that when I was younger, I was doing these drawings and they were looking really similar to these types of Aztec iconography that has like side portraits. So in 2019, I went to Mexico City and I made this book that it's just like, and this is only one page of the little book. It's like four pages or something like that. But it uses these iconographies and the Miami Andrews of Mexico City to create a juxtaposition between the history, the architecture, and my drawings. And so that is the types of things that were interesting to me. Also, like I really liked these images of Jose Posada recounting the history of Mexico through his own eyes. And seeing how they picture natives who are Aztecs and Mayans and how they picture the Spanish colonizers in these different types of like imageries. So that's really interesting to me. But going back to these drawings and what they're related to, is like this is a sculpture. These are smaller kind of studies than I have going on right now. So this has like BLM but it also, sorry. Hopefully this works. Sorry it's taking so long. But it'll be fragile because this is paper and it's cut using a precision cutter. So some of these things can like easily tear if you're like rough or anything. So you have to be kind of gentle and patient and you know, allow for things to just kind of release on their own. And so there we are. And so it came out of there. Do you use the paper a lot for your mock-ups, for your sculptures? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. It allows for a lot of errors to be like worked out. So this has a lot of free Los Ninos. And it has like this really kind of, if you're looking at okay. So there's just like several messages just like layered in there. Yeah, yeah, like this is a collaboration that I did with one of my CEO neighbors in Kristofferson, San Pablo. And so it has like, you know, ACAB. Oh, that guy do like the, he does an installation with a bunch of the S's from like fifth grade. Uh-huh, yeah, yeah, that's this. That's dope, dude. Yeah, dude, I've seen his like stuff. I've always wanted to see his stuff in person and like. It was in the library for a year. Just like the Simpson stuff too. Yeah. Wait, he worked in the library? This was hanging in the library. Oh, I didn't see that one. That's, it wasn't standing because on the, yeah, it was hanging outside near the, was it the video area, I think? But this is what we did together and he came to the other side and I really liked this one. Sorry. And then he did it with color. However, a series of sculptures displayed that really did come in the library called the cactus patch. And what inspired the shapes of your cactus patch sculptures and how did you make them? So you talked a little bit about mocking them up with paper. So just to reiterate, what was your inspiration for that installation? And then after you explained that, maybe jump into how you actually go from paper to I don't even know what material is made out of. So what materials do you use and whatnot? Well, I think the best way to do that is to highlight the fact that these are drawings and the drawings are done kind of automatically without any, sorry, do some, without any kind of direction initially. And then once I start to see things that I like, then I can then shape them and correct them and then do a lot of rehearsal so that it can get to a point that I'm like excited about. And in paper, you get to do that more frequently and you can use like an exacto blade and a cut and a scissor to see whether it has enough strength to move forward or to change certain things. And you know, like some of that is just practice and the other is trial and error. But the cactus patch, which is here, these are the works, I think they're, I think 15 works. These were collaborations created over a period of like 18 months for this alternative art fair called Other Places. And so I just did a little mock-up installation in this empty studio space to show you what it's like to see the work, to see how, what it's like to look at something. So as you can see, like the sculptures that I make are similar to folk art in that they're like in space and they make work, they take over things and they have a presentation, but they're thin. They kind of honor minimalism in an interesting way where they vanish. Like this presentation vanishes. And so that's kind of like the homage that I developed in loving minimalism because it goes away, like this piece completely vanishes but then it's like really vibrant and it has texture and it has this illusion of space, which when I was studying was a really critical factor of my understanding of painting. Because painting is like this really cool way of moving color and pigment in space in order to create the illusion that the space that you're in is actually deeper than it is. So before they had paintings on walls, they had carpets and the carpets would tell narratives and stuff and it was kind of far out. I mean, also like cave drawings and stuff like that. So I wanted to look at paintings and I wanted to look at sculptures and I wanted to do it in my own way. So I started to make sculptures that were flat in order to keep kind of like this idea related to minimalism and particularly Donald Judd who makes these woodblock prints that have lines. But also kind of do it in my own way because in Mexican culture specifically, if you go to Mexico and you grow up in a Mexican household, the collections inside the house are pretty bright and they have a lot to do with kind of the contrast to the environment that you're in and cities like Guanajuato are incredibly beautiful because they have such a long colonial history. So they paint houses that are a certain age one color and they have like a criteria for different colors. As they get older, they repaint them. So then the mountain sides are really bright and colorful like regions like Oaxaca have bright artistry in like these little beads that they make art out of and they make clothes, they make table cloths but they're incredibly beautiful. There's a long history of wood carving in Mexico that's also related to this. And so I find that those aspects of my native culture are strongly related to the materials that I choose and the kind of process that I've developed. But for the cactus patch, I wanted to kind of, well, what I wanted to do is to learn how to be a better communicator with other people. So I challenged myself to collaborate with other artists and learn more about how they work by like kind of at the risk of failure learning about their process. And it was a really rewarding experience because all the different people that I worked with and it ended up adding to the project in such a phenomenal way that when the opportunity came to show all the work again at the library, I jumped at the opportunity to support because it was such a beautiful building and to have all the work and all my collaborators have a place for that work to be seen for a year was phenomenal. Actually, the library was mentioned in this library and somebody sent me a magazine of the libraries mentioning that I think is relevant. And it's over here in my studio wall because it's like my inspo wall. So I have different types of things that I look at and thinking like who I was when I was a baby painter in 2008. But then also like this really cool design, a building design and construction that has the library and also highlights the sculptures in the atrium. That's awesome. Walking into the library in the morning for work and seeing those sculptures was like always a nice thing and it made me feel like I was like in some, like not just like a normal library, I'm just like in this like living culture. So I'm really grateful that you had your sculptures in there. Yeah, it was a real treat to be able to like share them with everybody. What are they made out of? So they're all made out of plywood because that's the easiest material for me to work with and an economic budget. I have, there's a sculpture in Gumbiner Park, which is across the street from the Museum of Latin Art, Latin American Art, off of 6th and Alamedas that is about 12 feet tall and has lights so you can see it 24 hours a day. And it's right next to the skate park so it's pretty cool when I see people tag Gumbiner Park and they're doing tricks all around it. That's pretty awesome. And this is the negative, let's show you the negative. And really quick, do you use like a CNC machine or do you like carve them out by hand? Oh, that's a super cool question. So this is the negative for that sculpture that's in the park. Oh, dope. But insofar as like what tools I use, I can show you. So these are drills, drill bits in order of my coals and then this really awesome cutter. I just got it recently. It's like a chainsaw. But as a handheld chainsaw, it is brutal. I love it. It makes like these really wonderful straight cuts. And then I have this like workhorse of a Ryobi jigsaw and I destroy these things pretty regularly. I think I go through like maybe two a year. And so yeah, that's kind of, these are different types of tools and these sprues and things that I use to like mount them on the wall and do different tools. So you truly do just do it by hand. No CNC machine. For the most part. This was done with a water jet cutter. And have you seen before, kind of actually like to have this cutter called the Cameo Plus. And it's kind of, it kind of works like a CNC because it reads X and Y coordinates and then it drops a cutter so that it follows it and that's how I make these smaller ones. Yeah. And then that, you do you have a Cricut or something? I have a Cricut. Yeah, I love it. Yeah. So I do those. And then that gives me a file that I can then later send to a CNC machine. Wow. Yeah, that's amazing. Artie, we are kind of going off the rails. Do you have any questions you want to bounce off of? Off the rails in the best possible way. You're a great, yes, Jorge. No problem. This is actually kind of what I was, I was hoping for. Like, we have our script and our questions, but that's just, you know, we don't need to go by it. It's just, I think this is more dynamic than just, you know, question, answer, question, answer. I'm having fun going on the tour. That's why I'm just keeping quiet. So I'm just, you know, so you can pick, just pick a next question and we can just keep going. Well, I was kind of curious about like your sculptures. So you do those, the big sculptures, they're automatic drawing too. So these collaborations were drawings that were matured with my collaborator. So each one was like a three or four sit down kind of three hour kind of thing that allowed us to go from a conversation to interest, to drawing, to a design, to materials and cutting, and then engineering, and then leaving the artwork, the sculpture with the artist so that they can work on it at their pace with their own materials in their space. And then, you know, months or weeks later, I would get the artwork and return and get it. I would then get the artwork back and then that's how the inventory started to become a mast. And so after 18 months, it just got to be a lot. And actually there's more than a handful in Tijuana, which is my other studio, that I use quite frequently in order to do installations in different parts of Tijuana. So the fact that I don't have to hang them in the wall and I don't have to show them in interior spaces, one lends itself well to this interesting situation where indoor spaces and exhibition spaces are a privilege. And so then to like go back outside and to engage with communities and individuals that don't go to museums or don't have that type of like enriched culture or like cultural infrastructure, you get to engage with like a public dynamic. And I think that that's been really rewarding because I have always referred to art in a very urban way. It's not something that I look at, that I grew up looking at in museums or in white spaces, but in urban spaces. So graffiti and over hand overpasses were very important to me in my understanding because it showed this avant garde, like I'm gonna put my life at risk to hang off of an overpass and put what I want to put there. And so this effort to exercise our statement of self was critical in my understanding as an artist because I wanted to be a painter but I don't wanna ask for permission to hang my work. I wanna be able to just hang or just to install my work. And I think that's where minimalism kind of helped me see my interventions in a like quick way, like minimal hardware, minimal permission, minimal like footprint. Yeah, I think that's really interesting. I think a lot of the times people are in anxiety waiting for like all these things to fall in their lap or there's always like an excuse like I need this and that so I can make like a successful art piece. And it's like think your art is really based in just like using everything you have around you and just like just like executing it. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, when I finished grad school, when I finished going to school at Yale and I got a job at a gallery and it was okay. Like they paid me okay, they paid me okay. They didn't pay me well, they paid me okay. So like I was paying my bills but I was still struggling to survive. So I was kind of frustrated in that the gallery itself was such a commercial trap for people that wanted to just fill their like bathrooms or kitchens with art that you know had a name. And I thought that that was an interesting position to be at that like over time kind of jaded my perspective all about art and capitalism and art and commerce and it also made me realize that I couldn't be working. Like I would get frustrated because I would be working and handling other artists' work but at the same time I was like, when am I gonna be able to like focus on my own work and handle my work and be able to make my artwork and so that somebody else can handle it? You know, when am I gonna be able to make that pivot? And I realized that I couldn't do it if I was working in that gallery. So then I had to kind of reconfigure my lifestyle so that I can have like a very low overhead and have this more kind of grassroots approach that had more to do with building a community so that there could be lateral growth. And that's where Cactus took a major impact in my life because it became this coalition meaning that there's like a group of people to create, to transform urban space. So like together we're working to change the community as a group, not because like I'm the steward of something but because together we can include our ideas and have a platform to expand. So like I wanna throw out a shout out to like John Sutton, Shea Vito, Olga Hogan-Finley, Hannah Perez, Christian Ramirez, you know, all these different people that I work with that you know, Rebecca Gieskin, all these different people that really contributed and you know, allowed them to like learn from them and live with their work and be in this position so that I can continue to expose their work to other people as a group. And so like not asking for permission and I thought about Cactus as this thing about like, you know, how does one enter communities or neighborhoods and like create something that's enriching but not imposed on other people like open up a conversation and a dialogue so that they can include their perspectives and have it be a rewarding exchange because that's really hard. Like as a human being communicating with other people is you know, sometimes easy and breezy but other times it's really difficult and emotional and heavy. And so when you're doing that with non-verbal communications that takes another degree of empathy that you have to practice and I wanted to get better at that. So I think all of this work has a lot to do with my internal maturity as a human being and being able to work with another person. That's awesome, man. Yeah, you did mention Cactus Gallery and that was an awesome gallery that you had going on. Do you think you'll, there's a chances you'll ever open up another gallery and how do you think that'll be like post COVID like our galleries in general, I guess? Oh, that's cool. That's something that I've been working on like learning more about with other place other people that have spaces. And what I've found is that I don't have a desire to take over a space and use it as a gallery for exhibiting art because it takes a lot of responsibility. The responsibility is that you take on just sort of the, was it like the caretaking of an artwork? And so that also means that you have to, an effort in promoting, you have to take effort into having that artwork be seen. And if you continue to add to that calendar, then it starts to take away from focusing on other things. And so I think three years of doing Cactus in Long Beach was really great and it provided opportunities for lots of artists to come into Long Beach and also lots of artists in Long Beach to get their first exhibition. And it was a great opportunity for artists to document their work in a clean white wall. It was an opportunity for that East Village community to be exposed to emerging contemporary artists versus the types of art that is being shown at the Long Beach Museum of Art or at the Piem or Mola. It's a more grassroots kind of adventure. And what I found is that the exposure that I was getting in Long Beach was great, but it was really local and it was maybe more of a desire for me to like use an opportunity to get these artists or to get my collaborations with artists in Long Beach in exposure on a grander scale or a wider scale. So I started to do art fairs. So earlier in 2020, I did an art fair in Mexico City and that allowed me to collaborate with different people. And it ended up being kind of wild, like all the different things that happened in Mexico and like three exhibits in Mexico City in February, March. And then I led to an art exhibition in Berlin in 2019 that led to like this other project that's still going on in Holland in Rotterdam with a bunch of artists in the space called Mad Lab. And so it just became this doorway in accessing exhibition platforms that are on the same level and want to encourage each other. So I'm really excited because later in 2021, I'll be putting an exhibit in New York. I'm really excited to announce that. The details are a little foggy right now, but I'm really excited about that conversation and how that's going. Awesome. Art, do you wanna throw in any questions? I think we've pretty much gone through everything Jorge, that was great. We don't even have to ask the questions. You did such a great job of covering a lot of the things we wanted to touch upon. Since we don't wanna take up too much of your time, maybe we could just, you know, focus on the outro unless there's anything specific you wanna get into. I wanted to maybe propose like a virtual kind of like, okay, so I wanna maybe organize like a game between you two will be like one of you guys tells me to walk one way and the other one tells me to make a left or something like that. So we'll do like a virtual kind of direction so that you can see the installation, like see where your creativity goes versus me showing you this installation from my point of view. Does that sound fun? Yeah, sounds like a virtual reality. So I'll go from this in the front room or the front of the entrance and y'all can tell me where you want me to go. So I'll walk forward. Where are we going? Turn right. Can we look at, can we, can you put the camera down lower? I kind of wanna see this whole. Yeah, this artwork by Hennepinus is really outstanding. I really like it because it echoes the other one on the left. So it's like the same design. All right, we're gonna continue right. Zoom into the purple piece in the corner. Turn around and look at the whole room. Then put the letter up. Do you approach them all the same or on some of them? Do you like start with the form? Like does the artist paint this like piece of plywood and then you cut it or do you cut it out and then they paint the plywood? I cut it out and then they paint it. We draw it, we transfer the drawing, we cut it and then like because they're present only when I'm cutting. So then that allows me to like ask questions about like understanding their drawings. All right, what else? Can you go straight like towards, I guess you have to loop around but there's like a big contour of them at the very corner of the installation. Yeah, you need to just pan and look at it. That one looks more like out of all of them, that one looks more abrasive or not abrasive like jagged. So this is real interesting work made by Gerardo Romero who's based in Rosarito, Tijuana and it's gonna be in a residency in January somewhere in Mexico. And he's an undergraduate artist who makes a really dark kind of tempered work with a lot of frantic energy. And it's really surreal to see the sculpture stand up because it was created roughly in the beginning of the year and finished right before we went on the first heavy lockdown. So it was like this strange kind of emissary of the news that 2020 was gonna be because as you can see there's these coffins and crosses and there's like these like strange kind of like human kind of things that are spirits or ghosts and it's ghostly and haunting It has this, it has a tone and a temperament and that I've really value because it's not my aesthetic. It's not how I would work, but it allowed me to learn physically and cutting the shape what it's like. Do I'm gonna go in the back or? Oh yeah, I would love to see the backside. So yeah, this is a work by Asia Morris who is a reporter at the Long Beach Post and also a super cool artist. And so this is the backside of the school, sure. And it's really nice to see it through other works. Was collaboration always a part? You talked a little bit about collaboration earlier, but was it always a part of like the framework for these types of creations like this cactus installation? Collaboration was something that I sought to get better at. I wanted to improve my own personal way of communicating with people because when I was working alone and making sculptures, there came a point where I felt like I was doing the same thing over and over again and that was really frustrating because I didn't want to be so narrow in my making. So like, for example, with minimalism we're sharing it with direction, with direction. Oh, right. So with minimalism, the steps that Donald Jen were doing were multiplied over and over and over and over and over again. And I felt like that type of monotony was so boring. It was nice, it's fresh, it's beautiful, but boring. So I didn't want to put myself in a position where like as an artist, all I do is the same thing over and over again. So I wanted to learn how to break away from that and I felt like collaboration was the strongest way to do that. Yeah, definitely. It definitely sticks through. And I think like the, I don't know if they're all called, do you consider them all like cacti or a part of a cat? Like, are they all cactus to you? Metaphorically, yeah. I think that they all kind of have that kind of support or structure that they yell out. So this is Robert Grodd and this is Cristianne Romero. I mean, Cristianne Romero is currently doing an MFA at the University of Michigan. And I think it's Michigan State University. And I'm really happy because, you know, like as you work with other people, you see them progress and grow and kind of like see where they were and kind of expect something that not expect, but like see them grow and be mature, it's also really exciting. But I digress from your question, which I answered it before I moved around. I already forgot my question actually, because I was like just looking at the art and it's so amazing. I think I was asking about the cactus and I just think it's like an interesting- Oh yeah. People to choose because they're so resilient. I call them freestanding paintings, which is the strange term. My girlfriend keeps telling me that it sounds like HPV. So I think that that's kind of funny. But yeah, I've always thought about them as like these paintings that are sculptural. So I always thought about them as freestanding paintings because like Rebecca Gieskin's painting here is pretty great because it changes how you look at it from one side to the other. And so in that sense, it's like legit painting, but like painting on both sides. So it's like a freestanding painting, but it's just a weird title and name that I somehow fell in love with because I'm like, I don't know, I'm weird. And when it comes to Akron, it was obviously cactus is one big one, right? But yeah, like I think Giesin's painting here is a really good indicator of like what I think about paintings and how they work. Like this works on the wall, for example. And like, let me see if this will work. I'm gonna move this just so you can see how it travels. I realize it's so, so liftable. So this on the wall works just like a painting. So it's just the illusion that instead of being a white wall, it's like fire coming out or like exuberance or some type of like violence or explosion. And so it's this illusion that the space is actually deeper, more profound and that, you know, more illusionistic paintings provide ideas that are more grand. But with abstraction, it's still the same thing. Like you're working at like to create like a screen or a barrier that gives you this idea of like moving, moving past it. And it's nice because in Giesin's painting, there's these black spaces. And I feel like that works really nice as like portals. So I always see like these panoramas that I create with these structures as something that is like related to having existential, you know, psychedelic trips. But like you have things that interrupt your panorama and that rupture allows users kind of come up with like some other kinds of profound ideas. Yeah, they're really beautiful. I can't wait to like for you to have like a warehouse full and be able to do all of them. It's so amazing. I think we're reaching the end of our interview and we just got one more question that we ask all again. Do you have a memorable library experience that you would want to share? Yeah, like a general library experience or like a library experience at the Billie Jean King? General. Well, yeah, me know what the library was always like a really big part of like me getting out of the house and having a positive or like a learned kind of experience. So it always felt really good to be in a library. It was hard for me to feel really comfortable in a library though because like I wasn't a very strong English reader for a very long time. So I was always intimidating because a library always felt like the place where, you know, more experienced readers go. And I wanted to be a better reader but it took a long time for me to feel at least that comfortable. But the art made a big difference in making me feel, you know, like I belong there because, you know, that's how I communicated with myself, I think seeing color and creative ideas. Thank you. Yeah. Thanks for being our guest again, Jorge. Yeah, Jorge. So we always give our guests the opportunity to, you know, give themselves some props. Do you have a website or some type of social channels that you want to, you know, promote and give yourself a shout out? Yeah, you can follow me on Instagram at StudioSTUDIO underscore Mokika, which is my last name, M-V-U-J-I-C-A. And if you want to follow the different types of cactus activities, just go ahead and follow C-A-C-T-T-U-S underscore L-V on Instagram also. And you get to see different types of things. Have you thought about doing like a 360 video or a 360 like webpage where you just like have a room full of the cactus and you could just like click and like... You know, that's been the hardest part of like documenting these three dimensional works is that like, yeah, they need to have that type of dynamism. And I haven't really been able to find like a strong platform to do that. I think today actually using that studio space, I'm going to focus on doing some of that because like this is part of that, that caretakerships that you have as a curator. It's like, you have to spend time documenting and doing all this and getting a 3D website that is like, you know, really fundamentally important and investing in your own work. And that's what, you know, you have to make that time. So today's that day. I appreciate it. Thanks a lot for the invitation. Already thanks a lot for thinking about me. I always think about you. Especially when I ride, especially when I ride by Gump being her part. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. I know where that piece is. It's cool. I like it at night the most. It's my favorite. Also, don't be afraid to like actually slap the hand because a lot of people just see the fence around it and then it's like, it tells you like, don't touch it but it's made out of aircraft quality aluminum. So that sculpture will not, it's going to last over a hundred years. There's nothing that's going to destroy it. And like, it'll take like 300 pounds to move it like anywhere. And, but because it has this hand that's out, like on the side, slap it, give it a high five. And you'll see that the aluminum will start to dance. And so I always found that to be the most compelling reason to make that sculpture because I wanted people to like feel like I was giving them a high five when they're in Long Beach. And that, that dance of the sculpture makes is like my excitement for them to be in Long Beach. I'm going to give it a high five and then I'm going to get arrested and be like, the artist told you. Nah, you're not, you're not, because this is going to be co-written. Everybody's going to see it. Something that I would want to suggest is like, if you want to see me tear this down, it's really quick and pretty awesome. So if you want to just hold on for maybe like two minutes, I think that's how long it's going to take me. Hold on, I'm going to take my mic so I'm not going to hear you with so horn. And that's the space again.