FULL INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT:
Painter and video artist, Christopher Miñán Fitzgerald, discusses his work as it has developed over a decade of production.

Your art practice seems to be about technology preserving us, as much as it is the technological accidents that often cause these situations in the first place.
Our trust, which is another way of saying our faith, in technology is connected to two things: science, which is good for humanity, and a vision, which is not always good; a vision that technology will magically provide us with complete automation, effortless power, and eventually some form of immortality free from suffering.

Is there always a personal or specific event associated with each project you undertake?
Yeah there’s an indelible catalyst, which I psychologically process mostly by making paintings, sometimes video work, sculptures becoming props, and photo-documentation. In fact, last week another relative of mine was intubated. So part of my Christmas was spent in the ICU.

Are you still painting people on life-support machines?
Yes. Those paintings are the bulk of my work and kind-of ground and anchor my other projects, like Vapor, which was a short film about a future society where everyone is immortal, and death forbidden. Then in graduate school, I did a series of performances under the title Vault, intentionally disorienting my body and attempting to leap across large expanses.

Soon after my younger brother died of heart failure, I decided to create a project about grafting the human heart to the brain, a surgical-technological process as a metaphor for the religious goal of unifying the spirit and the mind. The video portion ended with nearly eight gallons of artificial blood flooding the floor and draining down to the photography lab below. It was a literal mess.

In the years since, I’ve been working on my Professor Fitzgerald project, and as opportunities present themselves, continuing to transform the watercolor portraits of ICU patients into largescale oil paintings.

Tell us about Professor Fitzgerald.

I adopt the “genius” persona of a professor, in the format of DIY (do-it-yourself) videos, that are loosely inspired by the longest-running PBS television series The Woodwright’s Shop about traditional woodworking and building your own tools from scratch.

In my version, the host Professor Fitzgerald is terminally ill; the character’s development coincided with my father’s cancer diagnosis. Professor Fitzgerald uses common objects purchased from big-box stores, teaching us how to build our own devices that will make him and us immortal, despite continually injuring himself. It’s an allegory of how much harm can be caused as we accelerate our technological innovations before we really know what we’re getting into.

There are five inventions: Artificial Heart, Dialysis Machine, Cryogenic Chamber, Surgical Robot, and the Urn Rocket. The videos are about four to six minutes each. All are shot with extreme-sports cameras and accompanied by paintings and artifacts from production.

I like how these seem to infer how were a culture that used tools to free us, but it’s as if we have become a culture defined by our tools.
Right, and imprisoned by them. We walk this psychosomatic tightrope between enriching- prolonging our lives and losing aspects of our humanity in the process. Questioning technological promise, undergirds so many current conversations:  from issues related to destroying and preserving the environment, social media causing unprecedented loneliness, narcissism, and anxiety, to the recent fears of AI becoming something we’re not ready to deal with. I want these projects to awaken us, including myself, from the insidious coma of being enslaved by our own innovations.