{"id":34236,"date":"2013-07-28T21:48:20","date_gmt":"2013-07-28T21:48:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/alternativejonestown.com\/?page_id=34236"},"modified":"2013-12-05T18:29:53","modified_gmt":"2013-12-05T18:29:53","slug":"burgess","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/?page_id=34236","title":{"rendered":"Tethered and Inspired by Jonestown"},"content":{"rendered":"

At the conclusion of Painting Stories<\/a>, my article in last year\u2019s edition of the jonestown report<\/em>, I wrote \u201cI\u2019m still producing the Jonestown series.\u201d That is no longer literally true, in that I\u2019m no longer working with Jonestown directly as an subject, but the project has had a profound influence on my artistic practice. Studying the tragedy has allowed me to isolate meaningful themes. It also taught me a lot about the type of subject I feel most able to construct artworks from. The distance of subject from my personal experience frustrated my attempts to construct a powerful work, and it\u2019s why I moved on from Jonestown.<\/p>\n

Before I started working with Jonestown, solving formal problems was the thing that kept me engaged in my work. As I became more comfortable with my style, I started to grope about for more meaning. In hindsight, I turned to Jonestown because it inherently contained many of the themes I wanted to address. At the time, I felt like I was getting punched in the stomach. I didn\u2019t know what that feeling meant, but I knew I had to follow it. Religious belief, group imposition on the individual, dignity of the subjugated, sexual perversion, these themes resonated with me, and I knew I had to work with them.<\/p>\n

At first the impact of working with these powerful subjects was plenty to keep me engaged. After a time however, I noticed diminishing returns, and became restless. There wasn\u2019t any overt problem, but rather a lack: a lack of richness, a lack of clarity. The confidence and lushness that comes from personal experience was missing. I tried to make up for it by doing a ton of research, immersing myself in that world. In the end I realized there is only so much I could construct, so I moved on.<\/p>\n

Now I have started making a diary comic about my life, in hopes of isolating and fixing in my memory the things that are meaningful to me. I use these comics as composition aids, conceptual tools and as art in themselves. Both the positive and negative space of my Jonestown project taught me. I\u2019ve learned how to start isolating concepts that are meaningful to me, and received a powerful personal response on what type of input I can construct those concepts out of. When I paint, I\u2019m still working with many of the themes from Jonestown, but now on my own terms.<\/p>\n

(Nick Burgess can be reached at <\/em>nathral02@gmail.com<\/em><\/a>.)<\/em><\/p>\n

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At the conclusion of Painting Stories, my article in last year\u2019s edition of the jonestown report, I wrote \u201cI\u2019m still producing the Jonestown series.\u201d That is no longer literally true, in that I\u2019m no longer working with Jonestown directly as an subject, but the project has had a profound influence on my artistic practice. Studying […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"parent":34357,"menu_order":51,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-34236","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/34236","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=34236"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/34236\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":51028,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/34236\/revisions\/51028"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/34357"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=34236"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}