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Ciriza is a multi disciplinary artist who cares a great deal about unearthing dark matter for transformation.
She works in a variety of mediums- music, performance, drawing, sculpture, and film.
You’ve lived in several California landscapes; knowing your work to be rooted in the earth and body, I’m wondering how each of these landscapes affected the kind of work you made while living in them, if at all. Additionally, is there a particular kind of landscape that you find most fruitful for creating art? What makes it so?
We are made, of so many landscapes! We have to mine for them to know about that, though. Internal landscapes, as well as the ability to transform our flesh landscape… They are interchangeable… One informs the other.
We are living organisms that thrive on the pelt of the earth’s flesh, therefore we have much to observe in the way she operates, and can follow suit in replenishing cycles within our own lives, as well as learning the necessity of beauty and destruction as a vital force.
California happens to offer so many dynamic landscapes… the Bay Area, for me at that time, was about the people. The clear channels of blood lovers immersed in the chamber of of that 7×7 San Francisco fog magic… that place like no other has a way of bending whatever is within its belly, it is a land on another spirit level… so beautiful and blinding in its intensity…tearing the cases of “selves” open… a writhing miasma of raw souls, animal instincts intact, all planes opennnnnnn…
The desert was about the absence of people. The existential queen breaking down Every Thing true, dissolving all mirrors, all ego… only a wet nerve and painful essences.
And Los Angeles… is ice cold isolation in the perpetual clinical light and heat of the sun bulb … an oh so delicate self sustained levitating flake pastry, breathing in emergency room level mania…how?!…
I ride alone. All- one.
still from a performance of Yolk Drips from Kingdoms of Sleep
What was impetus for your recent performance Yolks Drips from Kingdoms of Sleep?
The need to translate shadow. The wetness inside the very viscous dark spaces when they arrive into light. We all have them. They are the essential underside of the sunlight. Yolk Drips from Kingdoms of Sleep is the birth/ death canal. It is the moment of becoming, straight from the carnal gut.
It is a state of being that really must be regularly explored…not on a stage, but anywhere. Unfortunately, usually that leads to 5150s… ugh.
When creating a performance, do you an ideal vision of what the performance will do for you and/or the audience?
Well, it’s all about translation, thats it. And it either does or doesn’t translate. I try to listen for, and pull all the elements to best tailor that feeling, distill, and push out.
How do you prepare for a performance, if at all? Whenever I’ve seen you perform you seem to be completely present and embodied– how do you enter and stay in that space?
The preparation is in the process of all the steps, even going to the cornerstone to buy toilet paper. The process is the performance. It’s all- one.
I only give from internal spaces I usually am constantly within, its just, you know… with some prepared tailored symbols and a time to show up.
And a lot of hours alone, listening in quiet spaces, and the absence of a clock within those days helps…
Hair Face Casket for Oya
What were some of your favorite imagined worlds when you were growing up? Do these worlds (from movies, books, songs etc) still inform your work in any way, and if so, how?
I spent a lot of time in between worlds. The physical world of unreliable matter all around was always bending into other things and meanings… I think the imagined world was this world, ha! So very dark and brilliantly bright at the same time.
I still see it that way. We make what we imagine to an extent. There is somehow a collective reality happening (the habits of the complex fine tailoring of socialized repression/ oppression, I think)… though we have access to so much more that creates what our personal realities unfold into. It’s a true belief in phantasia as evolution. That is so absolutely and truly our own access to personal freedom, because it is of the soul- level.
But also, when I was tiny, I was always around things like music and records, silkscreen inks… I could see there were ways to channel and use all that dark color and shifting energy…
What is the most frustrating part of your art-making practice, and what is the most exciting? Do you try and incorporate creativity/creation into the constant rhythm of your life, or is it more sporadic?
Frustrating? The earthly bondage of time and money.
Exciting? That it’s happening all day long, even invisibly. Nothing can stop that. It’s ultimate freedom.
Creating is definitely a constant rhythm, though not in the sense of sitting down to produce a specific… more like, the information is in constant communication. And when it’s time, it’s time.
