Xavier Lopez Performance #7: Tales of the Soft Cyborg: The Spaniard.

Xavier Lopez Performance #7:  Tales of the Soft Cyborg: The Spaniard. 

After several years, after having lived in Europe, after having been married and gone to graduate school, I was single and ready to return to doing performance art, this time in Seattle, WA.  After a devastating divorce that had left me demolished; I took a year off from everything and had just begun showing work again, especially sculpture and painting.  At this time, as well, I began to write for the local online newspaper, the Post Intelligencer and became fast friends with local artist Ryan "Henry" Ward and a particular band of Street Artists.  The "Soft Cyborg" had moved into the world of sculpture, including ghost sculptures and moving, flexible, latex sculptures.

Soft Cyborg: Ghost Story: A mixed media audio/visual sculpture including the video Soft Cyborg: Brothers, which was played below the ghost forcing the viewer to look under the skirted folds of the ghost's sheet.  

Video of Soft Cyborg: Brothers from underneath the Ghost sheets.

This is the video projection part of an installation I did at the Faire Gallery Cafe in Seattle Washington as part of the Soft Cyborg series.

 

During my time at the University of California, Davis, I had been working with latex and plaster making large sculptures with them.

It was a logical next step for latex to find its way into the performance. 

The actual performance took place at the Anne Bonney, an antique shop that was next door to the Faire Gallery and Cafe, at which I often showed art.   The Spaniard, the creature/protagonist/antagonist in this performance was very loosely based on the infamous shaving scene from the Melville tale, "Benito Cereno."  More for the feeling than in any concrete way. but also possibly in the way that the scene depicts the consummate definition of an unreliable narrator.  

In fact, this entire performance is about telling stories, whether real or imagined, truth or lies.  The performance begins with the Spaniard either speaking through or speaking to a stuffed monkey and ends with the Spaniard wearing a sailor's cap playing records telling war stories and painting pictures.