Interview transcript
Kon Trubkovich: I went on a cross country trip and I took an old video camera with me. Each time I made a pause it was different. I think of these video pauses as how you build a sort of narrative structure within them. It always somehow considered with what was going on in my life, I started thinking how I could strip all the metaphor from the work. When you left with a origin story the one word that popped into my head was “Mama”.
If you use the word then you have a new obscure with this video static, it begins to describe my relationship to that word, which is not a direct relationship. So this difficulty of the connection became real central theme in the work and the static became a description of the distance or the difficulty.
Images from the work “Mama” became paintings of my mother from the party that she threw before we moved to America. I began to think of things as pivotal points so I can have an emotional entrance into the work. That became one point of reference.
The other point of reference became Ronald Reagan’s Berlin Wall speech. The other paintings that I’m making with his image are one second of that footage. The combination of that ego meant to be some kind of a self portrait.
I had this image of Lenny Bruce on my desktop. The profile, when I distorted it, began to look like me. So, I’ve been using his images as stand-ins for my self portrait. The images that will be at the Armory are two profiles, they are distorted, almost falling apart. They are description of the difficulty of connecting, I think that technique is secondary.
Watch more interviews from The Armory Show. Watch more interviews from ADAA: The Art Show.
This interview © galleryIntell. Images © Kon Trubkovich, provided courtesy of the artist and the gallery.
