Mi vida es arte - My life is art

Traveling to Mexico City

I'm leaving Mexico City a different person and I didn't expect that. I spent a week here with my boyfriend rushing around to different exhibits, seeing architecture and eating amazing food. The usual tourist stuff. So what was different?What left a lasting impression was the homage to and display of the integration of art and life.

Architecture was combined with video, combined with furniture, combined with photography, combined with print making. In essence, the artist or artists had rich displays of work not just their one medium, but it became clear that their life and everything that they did became a part of the exhibit. A simple example was Frida Kahlo's house.

The Luis Barragan House. An amazing example of Mexican architecture.

It wasn't just about her paintings but all of the story of her life that influenced those paintings as well as the environment she painted in and the objects that she surrounded herself with, her clothes, her jewelry, her animals. The exhibit was multidimensional and acknowledged all of her. And many other exhibits we went to did the same, the Barragan House, an exhibit at the Tamayo Museum. It wasn't just about what the artist produced but about where, how their life influenced their work, and the other creative arts that influenced them as well.

This opened my eyes to seeing the disparate threads of my work and my life coming together. I started to imagine integrating them in a way I hadn't thought of before. The scale of my work changed from merely 2-D photography, to incorporating the audio I collected so long ago from pregnant women, to video, to the 3-D work and to other work that I have had stored in my mind but not realized.

I am returning refreshed and energized to realize a bigger picture of what I am doing.

Mi vida es arte.

PS I met up with some old friends and photographed them with their kids in the beautiful post office.

MORE PHOTOS FROM THE TRIP.