Bernie Diaz

Bernie Diaz
Austin, Texas, USA

STATEMENT

I manipulate words and images through a process of revision, omission, and embellishment. This process migrates from paper to pixels and back to paper. Most images and words belong to me, but some are discovered.

This scavenging, cutting, layering, overlapping, rearranging, decorating, and merging entail a process of making formal sense of seemingly unrelated parts. In turn, this results in a lineage of hybrid, glyph-like assemblages.

Unlike glyphs, these new arrangements don’t need to be deciphered. These aren’t puzzles or riddles. Instead, these compositions seek to redirect, to obscure the origin of its parts; to achieve a sense of completeness from a state of fragmentation. The work is related in several ways to personal and universal notions of identity and identity formation.

BIO

Bernie Diaz is an artist and educator residing in Austin, Texas. Diaz earned his MFA from the Meadows School of the Arts at Southern Methodist University. A queer, first-generation Mexican-American, Diaz was born in the Midwest and spent his formative years in Eagle Pass, a southwest Texas town on the border with Mexico. Diaz’s work explores notions of identity, hybridity, and fragmentation, and currently works around three conceptual frameworks: embellishment, omission, and revision. An essay and selection of Diaz’s work was published in Aztlan: A Journal of Chicano Studies at UCLA’s Chicano Studies Research Center. He currently serves as an Associate Professor of Art and Chair of the Art Department at Austin Community College.

ARTIST CONTACT

EMAIL | WEBSITE

IMAGES