Map of the Ocean (detail)
2010
graphite on mylar
55" x 47"
What is your definition of art?

Art is a method of knowledge.



What influences your art?

First, other art. After that, I think the single most influential thing is having worked with computers for a long time. I think that how I work now is a projection of the kind of logic one assumes when using computers as a primary tool, specially when programming. Breaking problems into fundamental parts, thinking in terms of information and operations, looking for the simplest solutions...

Also, if I check the tag clouds of my bookmarks and the blogs and things I read online there is also a lot of: science (and history and philosophy of science), geometry, math, perception, cartography, history, politics, astronomy, funny (?), architecture, information visualization, animals, biology, Colombia, feminism, electronics, violence, D.I.Y, economics.



How do you title your work?

I try to describe what it is rather than what it is about.



What are some challenges you constantly face in your practice?

Becoming too efficient and comfortable with my skills and what I know. That happened to me before, so now I try to make myself a little uncomfortable with every piece. For instance, I try to not make a piece in the same medium as the last one. That way I keep moving and learn something new everytime.



What is the role of the artist in society?

The manufacture of doubt.



What advice would you give to a young artist?

Don't let what you think your work is about become your boss. An artist statement is not a contract.

My work is an interrogation of the agreements on transparency, neutrality or authority of constructed systems of representation and knowledge that include world maps, the platonic solids, the cartesian coordinate system, the (Euclidean) plane, or film. This is done generally through an economic and systematic modification of the fundamental geometric or informational regimes over wich these agreements are built. These operations, while acknowledging the efficiency and elegance of those constructions, also reveal their paradoxes and test the perceptual and intellectual inertias they inoculate. Currently, my primary subject of interest is the color black.

David Peña Lopera (Bogotá, Colombia, 1981) has a BA from Universidad Nacional de Colombia. Currently is completing an MFA at San Francisco Art Institute as a Fulbright scholar. Has taught in Universidad Nacional de Colombia and Universidad Jorge Tadeo Lozano, both in Bogotá.