I am grateful and pleased to show this work in my last feature as Visual Arts Curator of Placeholder. I am making room for other amazing artists and administrators to contribute an artistic voice to the magazine through a curatorial residency, and I am moving onto working behind the scenes of the organization. I’ll leave you all with some words from Bella (a.k.a. Luz Silk), one of the most interesting and beautiful people I have met in Sacramento. I am sure many artists relate to the insights she describes about her work.

“It’s kind of hard for me to separate myself from my art. I don’t really, everything is art to me. When I’m making art and living life I have a tendency to act quickly and figure it out later. It feels like I’m guinea pig and examiner of my own wacky life experiments. But yeah - I create art furiously and voraciously, I think about a lot in the process, and I see new things later on.”

“I look inward and outward then weave those scenes on the page.”

“Every image is a portal to: a time, a place, and a feeling. I don’t always title my work. To me, the image speaks for itself, more than words can express. The final work is always a kind of fine mess that is clear and cryptic, which I find to be an accurate depiction of perception. Life can be such a mess. There are so many pieces and factors; they don’t always seem to fit together or connect. I make connections on the page. I pull myself together out of the jigsaw soup of my experience.”

“The art is a voice.

The artist finds self in multimedia work.”

Follow on Instagram: @luzsilk