9:15am | Mick Victor is the founder of I Mobius, a media design and production company here in Long Beach. He has a background in music composition and performance, and served a brief stint on the board of the Arts Council for Long Beach. In the last several years, he began to seriously explore fine art photography.
An exhibition of his work, called Art Unexpected, opens on Saturday, November 20th, at the Coffee Cup Cafe, which is located at 3734 East 4th Street. The show features images from the streets of Los Angeles, London, New York, and Venice.
I asked Mick how photography became an expressive media for him.
Mick: I’ve always been a photographer, even in childhood. I just never thought of it as a prime form of expression because I was so much into the music world, study, and college. But I always took photos, and always wanted nicer cameras. I think, in the last 5-6 years, I started really living with the camera as a means of expression for how I wanted to say things.
Sander: What did you want to say?
Mick: I think there is quite a beautiful sense of chaos to the world. We fight it, and try to change it everyday, but the truth is that the world, with all these people and things and stuff, is going to be chaotic. There are things worth changing, but the day to day cacophony of sounds and images and words and motion and tears and laughter… well, if you relax a little, it has a balance. Sometimes quite a beautiful balance. When I discover one of those balances, I find the camera is a great thing to express that frame in time.
At right: Soho Garden – Photograph by Mick Victor
Sander: How does street art, or graphitti, reflect that balance?
Mick: Well, for me, I’m not so interested in what someone tried to paint or draw. I’m interested in what several people tried to express in mostly the same place. Someone paints something and leaves. Someone else comes by and paints something else, to them entirely unrelated, but it ends up in the general same space because that’s where there’s room or that’s where no one can see them paint and, after this happens 3 or 4 times, you start to get that beautiful chaos where one thing leaves off and another begins. THAT’s the drama of a single frame I’m looking for. I have no interest in simply documenting intended graffiti. I want the collision of four or more people trying to speak all at once in the same place.
Sander: Do you find yourself drawn back to the same spots, looking for new revisions to surfaces you’ve explored previously?
Mick: Not really. I like to keep moving. Otherwise, I just look at the wall or the street the same way I did the last time, and then I’m disappointed if it doesn’t have a whole bunch of great new stuff on it. It’s as much about my ability to see and interpret what has occurred as it is the actual paint they’ve put there. So no, I keep moving because finding one of those walls or streets or pieces of pavement is like a treasure, and that drives my will to stay there sometimes for hours trying to see it in various ways.
Sander: You mentioned having a background in music. What did you do?
Mick: I have a degree in keyboard performance, concert piano + harpsichord. After that I began writing, and toured the Midwest as a writer and performer for about four years. The trouble was it seemed all there was to do was to go back to the same places and do it again. I was asked, then, to start writing for a theatre project and had such a great time that I continued. I often worked with Emily Mann, who is a very celebrated writer for off Broadway, while we were both still in Minneapolis, and Chicago. From there I went on to write quite a bit of music for commercials, small films, and industrials. I still do this work, but not as often.
Sander: What is the connection between your musical background and the visual works you’re now creating?
Mick: Probably much like others who connect different disciplines in expression. We are what we are. I think we all have some kind of song, image, or thought mantra inside us and, if we choose to express it, then we use tools like music, photography, paint, and words. So we, as artists, keep try to “speak,” time after time, with what we do. We want the world to at least consider the way we see things or hear things, if it makes us feel better. Music has a rhythm and I quite like that element. It’s reasonable then to think my camera likes and seeks some of the same things.
Sander: I often hear a type of rhetoric that likens art makers to business owners, with their sole motivation as creating sales of their work. What do you see as the societal role of the artist in the 21st century?
Mick: If nothing else, we encourage people to see something differently. Maybe that helps. As the budgets tighten, and they keep removing subjects from schools, it blows me away that they’ve now removed any kind of subject that requires or, at the very least encourages, interpretation. Science and Math: Not lot of interpretation there. So now we add in more nationalities, more socio-economic varieties of people in our cities, and we ask everyone and everything to get along.
Still, in the classroom, we have sucked out the interpretation gene. If there’s someone across the classroom I don’t agree with, or someone in society of whom I am suspicious, then seeing him or her express themselves, or interpret things in a new and different manner, is probably helpful in me thinking, “Hey, I like that guy or that girl. They really surprised me with the way they think, and they think about the same life values I think about. Wow! Maybe they’re not so bad or suspicious or mysterious after all.” The point is that, if we don’t help society to look at things in a different way, I think we’re well on the road to a lot of social friction and damage.
Sander: I’ve often thought that seeing the world as art can be taught, but I sometimes suspect that it is something some people are born with. Do artists have a responsibility to be societal ‘wayshowers’?
Mick: No, because not everyone works in art to communicate. Some work in art to simply survive with their own thoughts. Some work in and with art to express their anger, perhaps to no one. The weird thing is that “art” is on a pretty big sliding scale. “Art,” to some people, is just silliness or a mistake. To others, a line, an image, a color might be a gateway to a world so large they can’t even see the other end. We’re people all wired differently, and some of us are silly or brave enough to spend our days freely interpreting life as it goes by. It’s what makes us feel good, but I don’t think we’re obligated to be tour guides.
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Art Unexpected will be on display at The Coffee Cup Cafe through January 7th. Hours are 7:00am-2:00pm Monday to Friday, and 7:00am-3:00pm Saturday and Sunday.