Artisode; 1.6; Patrick Nagatani

Photography represents things and maybe I don't even exist and what you're seeing right now this is all just camera stuff. I mean my greatest audience seemed to be right brain thinking women, multi-taskers, women that are able to put aside how the pictures were made, what have stopped to do use, what type of film did you use, you know all that technical stuff and just get into like the idea of it like the dream, to live the dream with me. I worked with a friend painter named Andre Tracy and we constructed these elaborate sets of exploding light bulbs at phase exploding, downtown LA being hit with a nuclear bomb, working in a way as

a Tableau photographer which I've always been arranging for the camera in a directorial mode in a sense. So I moved out to New Mexico, the contemporary and historical issues New Mexico's marriage to the nuclear culture in a way. It's all here, the mining issues, the issues involving the national labs, contaminated areas like Morton de Canyon and Los Alamos, the development of nuclear weapon technology at that time and currently. I didn't say I'm an activist, I'm going to make this particular statement. In fact it was more an aesthetic statement than I wanted to make based upon these particular issues. One of my interests has always been who writes history, who creates history and

our understanding of that. So all of that became entwined in Riyoshi Nagatani, slash Nagatani excavation work which was about my linking up with an archaeologist named Riyoshi and finding out this kind of like story about finding these maps from Native American shamans and going around the world to every continent following these maps and what they found was luxury cars buried in various sacred sites in the world. All of the images in this Riyoshi Nagatani excavation work are photographs. There are no real artifacts or re-representations of artifacts which is also interesting to me about how photography re-represents things and how we take them, those representations as the truth. I had started reading about healing and growth with using color colored light and so I thought I'd probably be the Chinese, you know, the

Japanese who embraced this rather ancient Egyptian idea. On 2005 I found that I had colorectal cancer and this idea of healing became even more poignant to me and one of the images is about a month after my surgery and it shows both the photographer, the patient, the cancer survivor receiving chromotherapy. One of my theories is that I can't think about time or I probably never do these. When you just tear pieces of masking tape and you put them down over and over and over and think less about time and about completion of

anything you end up being in this nose thought zone. My life as a tapest has been guided by the process more than any other work that I've ever done and I don't mean just the materials but the kind of spiritual process of making the work. Dreaming the story and I try to apply that and as long as they keep evolving and each piece doesn't become redundant then I think I'll just continue to be a tapest.