Local artist Agnes Valderrama continues to stun and impress with her provocative pieces. Today we are reviewing her latest artistic and performance piece – “Birthday Ball”
Since our last review of Valderrama’s work, she has expanded her skillset with professional training in the names of several colors, as well as some brand name supplies, and she has done amazing things with these new advantages.
First we will take a look at the art on its own merit.
The medium chosen is a discarded May 2020 calendar which her parents never bothered to fill out. This is obviously a simple statement on the frustrations and wasted potential of a life spent under quarantine. Despite this, the artist had her mother contribute by circling the dates of Mother’s Day and her father’s birthday. Life goes on and there are still things to be celebrated despite the circumstances. We will continue to see this theme recurring as we continue.
The primary palette of the piece is various shades of purple, a color she recently learned the name of. She is eager to better herself and make the most of the time she has spent stuck at home, and to use those lessons in her work.
She also employed a collaborator for the piece. Her mother was asked to contribute several brown hearts to May 23, as well as small doodles of a bed and a dog. There could be any number of interpretations for this addition. I would argue that the brown doodles are transformative of the piece as a whole, not merely an incidental inclusion. However, they have been pushed to one side of the piece, while the broad strokes of the main artist take center stage. I see this as a statement of the value of the mother’s contributions to the artist’s development, while the artist continues to strive to put herself forward as her own person.
While the art piece on its own has great merit and interest, it’s the performance art aspect of this installation that is particularly evocative.
Immediately after completing the artwork, Valderrama took the piece and crumpled it into a ball. She declared that the art piece was now a ball, and also a birthday present (hence the work’s display title) which she then presented to various members of the family, as well as to inanimate toys.
This reviewer believes that it is definitely possible to over-analyze art, particularly performance art. It can be too easy to trivialize the meaning of a piece that could otherwise have infinite meanings.
I’d still like to present my own interpretation of the work, as one of only two first-person witnesses to the performance. The themes I see reflected here, both in the art piece itself and in its presentation, are of joy, celebration, and making the best of a bad situation.
What you don’t see here is the trying time the young artist was going through. Her mother had put her box of balls away in a locked closet, and in this period of Agnes’ life, she had not yet asked her mother to get the balls out for her. Therefore she was living in a joyless, ball-starved state, forced to make the toy she needed so desperately, out of something completely unrelated.
Just like the theme we saw before, of turning the bad situation of quarantine into a joyful celebration of her father’s birthday, here Valderrama is turning her toyless situation into one with a toy ball, which she then turns around and shares with those around her.
Her work reminds us all that “happy birthday” lives inside us all year long, if we only take the time to create it for ourselves.
“Birthday Ball” was confiscated and discarded after it became a distraction during livestream Mass.
