Alaric López (he/they), another of S4A’s newest resident artists, is a musician, poet, intermedia artist, literary translator, UCSD student, and a literature TA. After graduating summa cum laude from University of Texas - El Paso with a BA in Creative Writing, they moved to San Diego in 2021 where they are a candidate for the MFA in Writing.

Now that they have studio space at S4A, the next year will be devoted to completing their thesis project.

What is your thesis project about?

My project– I’m tentatively calling it Where Was I? –searches for meaning in primary colors. I examine a range of subjects like color theory, abstract painting, photos from my personal archive, as well as black holes and astronomical phenomena (among others). This project explores questions of how meaning is made and how we locate our place in the universe.

The tentative title of Alaric’s thesis project.

How did you narrow down your topic for this project?

I first had an idea in 2013 for a project called Primary Colors in the Urban Wild; I was going to basically take a bunch of photos of primary colors that I saw out in the world. So the ideas for this thesis project have been slowly forming in my mind for 10 years already!

This piggy bank from Alaric’s childhood sits in his studio, reflecting a lifelong love of primary colors.

What form will your completed project take?

It will exist in a lot of different forms. It’s like a kind of multimedia poetry that is handwritten and will be in book form, but the writing of these pages is also being filmed. There will be a video where you see the pages kind of coming to life.

It’s really important for me to handwrite this; it’s a rejection of tradition. I get so bored with black text on a white page, like in typeface. This feels much more engaging for me to make, and I feel like it’s more playful, tactile, and sensorially stimulating for a reader or audience. I just want to do something that feels more alive.

Some of Alaric’s finished pages for the project.

I make these black or white panels, and they go in the book. If I have to do revisions, I do them right on the panel. And I film everything. So even if there’s a revision, I’ll film the revision as it’s happening. I’ll pull the panel down, make some edits, and the film captures my hand making the edits.

The black panels are my personal autobiography in poetry form, and each panel represents specific memories associated with those pictures. The white panels are the present tense and the search through art and theory.

But it’s important to distinguish research from searching. This project is a search, it’s not really about research in an academic sense. It’s an engagement with these ideas and thinkers in a way that doesn’t pretend expertise, and is open to them with a sense of curiosity… searching for meaning and why something means something. Let’s just take a look at what other people have done, or how they’ve thought about these things.

I’m calling it “action writing,” which is obviously a little nod to the American action painters like Jackson Pollock and the abstract expressionists. There is engagement with those artists in my project as well.

You’ll see many abstract expressionists on Alaric’s bookshelf, like Cy Twombly, Clyfford Still, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, Franz Kline, and others.

You describe yourself as an intermedia artist. Tell us more about that.

I took that term from Dick Higgins. I just prefer it over “multimedia” because that one feels necessarily digital, whereas intermedia includes concrete, tactile, non-art materials. I can never do just one thing, stick to one medium. There’s always something else going on. If I’m writing a song, there are connections with poetry. My poetry is very musical, and obviously my poetry lately is this experimental stuff with all these different things going on, so the term “intermedia” makes sense.

How close are you to completing your project?

I’ve done 200-some panels so far this past year, and I’m expecting 700-800 total by the time I’m finished.

Watch Alaric’s Instagram account or S4A’s website, social media and e-newsletters for updates about future Intermedia Poetry Recitals. Or come meet Alaric and check out their progress in Studio #44 during each Open Studios. This interview didn’t even focus on their activities as a songwriter or a literary translator; there’s so much more of this colorful person to discover!

Introducing Alaric López