The Role of the Artist is to Listen and Disrupt: A Look Inside the Work of Adán de la Garza

By HALLETA ALEMU

Adán De La Garza is fueled by the conduit of artistry. Of how the role of the artist, for him, is not just the showcasing of work, but also the act of listening. It’s an interplay. From artist and audience, to human and political structure. De La Garza is interested in these dynamics and the roots that intertwine them, and ultimately, showing where these roots have grown rotten. Where these roots need to be harshly pulled, in order to unearth the fresh and new. 

Introduced to photography in middle school, the medium became his gateway into image-making. Going from snapping photos of his friends and the debaucherous skateboard scenes of the mid 90’s, to receiving his MFA in Interdisciplinary Media Arts at the University of Colorado Boulder, De La Garza’s progression through his artistic practice has been intuitive. 

His work now encompasses an array of outputs including sound, video, performance, and photography. In his work Protest Etiquette, De La Garza walks cautiously across a deserted landscape, balancing a flaming blow torch atop his head. The piece, a glaring response to those who say protests must be peaceful. How the behaviors of those suffering are criticized, while the injustices placed upon them are not. 

In his trilogy titled Adding the Sun, De La Garza planted a series of sonic experiments. Taking records of previously recorded natural elements, he then gradually burned the light of the sun onto them. With De La Garza as instigator and audience, he allows us to witness both a sonic and physical alteration of the record. What happens when we allow nature to speak for itself? It appears the sun, when given a platform, has things to say. We hear it’s scratchy, glistening disruption onto the record leaving us with the understanding that nature must be acknowledged. It just might be in ways we hadn’t thought of before. 

De La Garza is also a prolific programmer. He helms three of Colorado’s cutting-edge time-based art events: Collective Misnomer, Dizzy Spell, and Denver Month of Video. Each of these events challenges the notions of what is possible for video, gaming, and performance art. And what’s possible when artists in these arenas are brought together. The change that happens when those with like-minded visions vibrate in the space. Where these artists, or really humans, do not have to justify their existence on the barest of terms. This is what De La Garza hopes for in his practice: an ecosystem of like-minded individuals  helping each other through life and through art. 

Below, De La Garza tells us about the ethos behind his practice, how he considers programming to be an extension of his own art, and his favorite emotional sensations when taking in a piece of work. 

The following interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

I think there's always like this, "I have this serious art," and then "I have this other stuff that I do." And, you know, doing graffiti, skateboarding, going to punk shows, taking party photos, and doing whatever youthful activities I was doing at the time all seemed separate from the art world. Just documenting the sort of lifestyle I was leading as a younger person. I think because of my interest in photography, I just started taking more photography classes and started taking more art-based imagery in the latter half of high school. 

I didn't know what I was gonna do for college or if I was gonna go to college. But I got a scholarship to go to a community college in Tucson, where I'm from, and they also had a really good photo department. So, I just fell into schools with really good resources, which is strange to think about –  because public schools in Tucson are generally pretty bad. So, the idea that I was in these schools with resources geared toward photography seems rare.

Traversing to now, how would you describe your personal art practice? 

I talk about myself as a sound, video, and performance artist. I've been working on a piece about the desertification of Earth for a long time. Covid just kind of f— it up, and I couldn't travel for a while. So, I've been shooting around the Southwest since 2018 or 2019. It'll probably be a three- or four-part chapter piece, and I have one chapter finished. 

I've been looking at more environmental issues and how we progress as a culture with these types of issues in mind. I've also been thinking about how we move left as a group while not becoming burnt out. I'm really interested in the relationship between protesting, catharsis, and political stagnation.

To make any sort of cultural and systematic political adjustment, you need to tackle these things in a myriad of ways. It can't just be the person with the megaphone on the soapbox. It can't just be someone "working from the inside" -- There are so many different ways. You can do prison support. You can be a medic in street protests. I think people get caught up in looking at very tangible results and saying, "Well, you went to this protest, and nothing happened." 

So, I'm both very interested and very critical of how we choose to express ourselves and whether or not that expression is just so that we feel better. And this whole argument of "Well, as long as the protests are peaceful, then it's fine" –  It's like, okay, well, if we go back in history, there are almost zero examples of peaceful protesting actually changing any given issue without other protest elements being present. There's a peaceful protest and another thing.

America learns from violence almost exclusively. And not necessarily the sort of traditional, people fighting sort of thing. It could be the violence of gentrification, the violence of our healthcare system, poverty… – all of these other types of things, right? 

In order to see any substantial change, there has to be a severe amount of discomfort implemented on a certain demographic, typically middle-class white people and up. I'm really interested in these types of social dynamics.

How did you start your curatorial practice? Do you believe it's an extension of your art/artistry, or do you look at them as separate entities?

I think of them as the same. When I'm programming, I'm trying to guide the audience towards a specific type of mindset. I don't want to say I'm changing people's lives. If that happens, that's f------ perfect and amazing. But I don't assume that I'm substantially changing anyone's life. If anything, it's changing my own. Which I think is important for me. I try to listen a lot. My investment in art making isn't just because I want to talk. My world has been expanded, contracted, and clarified in so many ways and so many times by listening to and experiencing the work of other people. So, that part is what is most valuable about art making. 

I think it sounds a little romantic when people say,  "I'm a storyteller," --  but I want to hear those stories! I want to hear about those experiences. I think by experiencing other people's work, I'm not only a better person but also probably a better artist. 

When I'm putting together programs or exhibitions, I think about it as an artist and a creative act. I'm more comfortable with the idea of a programmer because it sounds more utilitarian or something. I'm not interested in touting myself as a curator. My political agenda is present in my programming. I'm more of a co-conspirator than anything else.

“My investment in art making isn’t just because I want to talk” – that’s such a powerful statement. Getting into each of your collectives, they all have overlaps, but their expressions are very different. How did they each come about? 

I learned from two different places. Watching my friends put on punk and hardcore house shows, and these sorts of things where you're just like, this band is coming, they're gonna play in our living room, and it's gonna be really fun. You can just do that. It's that simple. Then the other person is a friend of mine named Christina Battle. She and I had a screening series in Denver called Nothing To See Here from 2013 to 2016, and she showed me the ropes of how to do a lot of stuff. How to program things into a screening, how to talk with artists, and how to work with people to make sure everyone gets paid. I owe a lot of credit to those two experiences. When she moved back to Canada to get her doctorate, I started Collective Misnomer. 

This last September was the eighth-year anniversary of Collective Misnomer. Then Dizzy Spell came next, followed by Denver Month of Video. Dizzy Spell came about when I talked to Justin Ankenbauer, who makes video games with the group bearwarp, about trying to do a video game exhibition through Collective Misnomer. Eventually, a friend introduced us to Rafael Fajardo, who also has an art practice making video games, and we played video games for a few months, eventually becoming the first Dizzy Spell show, simply titled "Dizzy Spell," in 2018. After we finished that, it felt more like its own thing from Misnomer, so we kept the name and kept programming it together. 

Denver Month of Video (.MOV) is something my partner, Jenna Maurice, and I have been stewing about for a few years. We’re both video artists and just want to see more video art in our city. The idea was to dedicate an entire month to video—getting as many art spaces as possible on board to showcase it. In Denver, you can find painting, sculpture, or photography in galleries, but video art is uncommon. We wanted to change that.

We also wanted to show how many different forms video art can take and create entry points for people to experience things we wish we’d had access to earlier in life. The whole idea behind the festival is to make space for time-based works that experiment with all kinds of ideas and ways of creating.

The next .MOV is actually this July 2025! 

I think about all of these projects as siblings, haha! 

What do you hope for by bringing people together for events like these? 

I think a partial part of it is showing that there are opportunities in the Colorado area for time-based artists to work and show their work. I also make it a priority to pay all the artists that I work with. Usually, this is from charging a door fee or if I get a grant. But every artist gets paid equally in every one of the projects I'm involved with. 

I think artists are really scared. Speaking very broadly, this is obviously not 100% true, but I think artists are afraid that if they say no to stuff, they'll disappear. But if there are no opportunities or ones that don't pay anything, it becomes a tricky spot to navigate. I strive to create an environment where artists get compensated for what they're doing so they can keep doing it, and hopefully, that allows them more freedom to do the work they want to make, separate from the art market. It might not be much, but it's not free, and it's more about supporting the work they are already invested in, not asking them to make something else they normally wouldn't explore, like, say, in a commission model.  

Also, providing a space for local artists to come and see new work, but also potentially show their own work, and know that we can work on stuff together. Collaboration can result from coming into the same space and working together. I think the dream, you know -- I don't really dream of labor -- but I think the dream environment is that I'm working with and for my friends.

I feel like that’s the whole point of being here on Earth – you know? 

Right? Also, I think being curious is probably one of the most difficult and satisfying urges that you can have as an artist. Maybe as a human. I don't know if I can separate the two. Because curiosity is hard to maintain, it's really hard to go towards things you don't know or understand and feel like it's okay or safe to explore. For me, it's about trying my best to remain curious about things I don't know about and understanding that there are so many different ways that you can exist and live. Some of those are for you, and some of them aren't. But you only can do that if you see the door open. There always has to be an entry point for anything. Nothing materializes without someone or something sort of saying, "Oh, that thing's over there!"

I think I have a few preferred art-experience sensations. Awe, stupefication, feeling dumb, curiosity, and confusion. They're all variations of the same experience, but they're all about inquiry. None of those are a stopping point, right? Or they shouldn't be. All of those are about, "I don't understand this. How can I understand this”?

Halleta Alemu is a multimedia writer whose work is an act of dissection –  of zooming into the particles of reality to create new forms. Subscribe to her substack Electric Blue to read her poetic observations of the world.