REBECA
MÉNDEZ

In 1995, I was invited to give a presentation of my design and art work at the  ACD in Chicago. The announcement poster includes imagery from my fine art videos, installations, and letterpress work. In my lecture, I focused on the construction and deconstruction of identity through boundaries, both at an individual and at an institutional level. These boundaries by which we understand our place within society are largely delineated by the pathways of rational and promiscuous systems of power and socialization. What is most important in this is that these systems of power and ordering are so ingrained that they appear unquestionable. They to a large extent from the lens by which the world is made visible to us. It was interesting to come up with imagery and a design to represent myself-as a designer, as a thinker, and as an image maker. In my career as a communicator I’ve explored with the same curiosity graphic design, fine art, and video and film. To represent all those interests, I chose three images I created: the ‘hanging potato’ is from a fine art installation which deals with issues of nurture and control, the ‘eels in a bucket’ is from a short super-8 film I filmed in Kyoto at the Tsukiji fish market, and the third image is a letterpress print onto wallpaper of another art installation. This last one oscillates at the boundary between art and design by using ‘graphic design’ techniques.