Adrienne Rivera, Cleaning Chaos, 2024
For this piece, I decided to address a theme entirely different than before especially aesthetically. I chose to capture myself deep cleaning my apartment for extended period of time after letting it get bad due to due school, working two jobs currently, and depression and mental health. This is raw and honestly quite vulnerable footage of the reality of living as a young adult on your own or with a Roomate going through the same struggles, and having to acknowledge that often times our reality can be a physical manifestion of what is going on in our heads. The footage is chaotic and fast paced, with a black and white filter, it also lacks the aesthetically pleasing work I usually try to aim for. In this moment, I captured what it is also like to have ADHD and unmediated currently. I switch from task to task, never truly completing any of them. There are also many scenes in which metaphors for real life are also found. Very much of the beginning is spent washing dishes, only to have the pile immediately up again as I tackle the fridge and the rest of the home. Items are picked up, some are put away, and others find themselves in a new home for now as I scurry around cleaning, the entire time in my mind of course, thinking of what I need to do in my actual life later. It is reminiscent of a build up of past emotional trauma as well, the piles and piles of garbage I find myself hauling out of my apartment feeling like weight being lifted off my mind. This piece is an exploration into the nutty gritty ugly parts of life, our feeble attempts to fix issues that only seem to return and the spirit to try to over come this all anyways.
I was heavily inspired by Marina Abromavich when she says, “I hate the studio. It’s a trap to me. Ideas come from life” because I found this project and presentation to be a challenge for me. While juggling the start of my career and trying my best to finish out school, I found not only have my own home been neglected, but very much of my hobbies, passions, and especially art has been lost in the chaos. Surprisingly, however, ideas that used to come to me only in fantasy or dreams have now come to me in life, as I am inspired by the mundane, the common, the routine that I find myself in every second of the day. Life itself has become my canvas, and where only in this moment I am cleaning, I find myself clearing out this canvas to enter a new era. I also was inspired by one of last week’s artists, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, in Cleaning the museum—maintenance - She turned what is a part of her daily reality into her art. She took scenes from her own life of motherhood and service into a display of artistry. One of her quotes from when she first started was “I can do art or I can be a mother”, and its through her work this feeling is preserved, where women have to choose one or the other. But, she finds ways to fuse the two to have both. I can relate as a young woman entering this part of my life, almost juggling my two worlds. But there is beauty in both, and they cannot exist without the other is what I’ve come to learn in this art journey. Oftentimes, it is the nitty gritty, getting into the down and dirty, where we find diamonds, or where we feel the pressure to do better. Challenging myself in these ways has always been something I struggled with in my depression and ADHD, but its a challenge I regularly put myself up to because there is oftentimes no greater feeling than accomplishing feats, even if they’re small, that you thought you couldn’t face, or creating something out of nothing, or making a simple reality much greater than that. I was inspired by Shaun Leonardo in this sense, often we can dramatize and reimagine these scenes in our lives, often mundane, and yet able to leave a powerful, everlasting impact on our lives. Leonardo stated “ “I attribute my work ethic to them. However, it was in the mentality of striving for the best that I was also taught that success meant economic stability and mobility. And so art wasn’t really within my vision as a child: I never quite know what inspired me, other than the moments where I did see and take in art. I don’t know what drove me to identify as an artist because it wasn’t within my familial background—not that I know of anyway—and my only exposure to art, growing up in Queens, were the moments here and there where we visited the Queens Museum and the Metropolitan Museum.” I related to this not only as a young adult entering the workforce, but a first generation Latina American specially as he mentions. I feel there is idea spread, from machismo in the men their expectations from women in the household, to even just outsiders perspectives or generalizations from looking in. My roomate and I our whole lives had lived to be in service of others and our communities, constantly picking up after others that we indulged in having our own home, being able to act like “men” in a sense, and not have to do so anymore. We both became breadwinners in our own ways, stepped aside from our families but find ourselves very much trapped in the machine of capitalism fighting tooth and nail with school and our jobs. It oftentimes feels there is no way out, and so we indulge in these liberties and small rebellions of neglecting our home to such an extent because when we consider the likely timeline of our lives, will we ever get the chance to do so again? Even already as I have discussed, absolutely not. & so I clean chaotically, relinquishing any childish notions, and agreeing to settle into our supposed places in society, and with this new space allow ourselves a new era of other quiet rebellions in art and the self that can become a form self-advocacy and less like a version of self harm.
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