Amdur Productions Interview

I was the featured artist with Amdur Productions recently which was very cool!

Amdur productions is known nation-wide for producing many of the Midwest’s most respected and popular juried art festivals.

My interview with them is below

Amdur Productions: How would you describe your work?

Xavier Nuez: I try to find meaning, beauty and solace in darkness. My art serves as a means of escape and transformation. It’s a way for me to find beauty and peace and even a childlike magic in unconventional or even dangerous environments. 

AP: What does art mean to you? Why is it important to you?

X: I love to see the world through someone else’s eyes. And it doesn’t matter what culture, language or even century it was created in, it’s a universal language.

AP: What is your creative process? How do you typically approach a new piece of art?

X: My images are night photography. I bring along three large bags of battery powered colored lights and I light the scenes during long exposures.  I love lighting subjects that in daylight are drab or boring or scary and creating an entirely new beautiful fantasy world with my lights.   My process is to imagine the subject as a theater set and to light it in a very theatrical way. In the end the final images are stages without players which in turn invites the viewer to step in and fill the void. This allows them to see overlooked locations and emotions in a different way.

AP: What or who inspires your work?

X: My greatest inspiration came from the street photographers of the 1930s-50s like Robert Frank, Henri Cartier Bresson and André Kertész. Their work was about ordinary people and how in a fleeting moment or in a moment that seemed to last forever, they would place these people in a profound scene that spoke of the human condition. For several years in my youth I walked around with my camera shooting B&W street photography. Today my images have no people in them but in their glaring void they are all about people. 

AP: What themes consistently appear in your work?

X: My work is about finding beauty and joy in the shadows. It is a metaphor for what I’ve struggled to do in my own life.

AP: When did you first get into art?

X: I always loved pencil drawing as far back as I can remember. I loved drawing portraits and sometimes I ventured into surrealism. In my early teens I started painting and I knew then I would pursue the arts. When I was 17 I took my one and only photography class and it immediately took over my life.

AP: What advice would you have for aspiring artists?

X: Work hard, love the process and experiment as much as you can. That’s the only way to find your vision which is the key to everything else. If your vision is clean and focused, doors will open for you.