christoph /bio

Christoph Girard is so detached to everything and everyone, that his own undertaking as a radical queer vegan straight edge iconoclast is very conventional. The way he labels himself within so many subcultures makes it ironic for me to take a stand against representation, but the fact that he is so disconnected allows him not to share a social identity but to embrace the systems as a dissident within labels. Anyone who meets him comprehends a fragmented part of himself and would have to conclude with a multifaceted interpretation of who he is because he is a contortionist in structural disguise.

He is fascinated by the shared and marginalized identities of others who are disconnected from life in ways he is not. Like the poet Clark Coolidge, who is interested in geological rock patterns, absorbing the population is how he connects with nature. he is interested in the chaos of communication as a journalist, artist and poet; and chooses to spend his free time as a recluse immersed in the bizarre psychodynamics of social interaction because he is better able to sort things out in his mind clearly while seeing how intricate and alive everything is. How identity works itself into technical poetics is hard to articulate yet he believes there is a parallel between the components of a marginalized identity and the poetics of fragmentation.

As a graduate student at Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, he worked under the guidance of Paul Vangelisti, who actively translates and publishes Italian Futurist to Neo-Avant-Garde poetry. His first thesis addressed the obstruction of form through sound. He manipulates structures into a system of paradoxes in order to create lyric poetry through syntax, association and logic. A common thread in these disjointed texts is the way it can address detail and rhythm to ephemeral moments whose settings are unfamiliar, almost implausible to readers but still achieve a cadence within the realm of consciousness. These poems occupy a space between tangible and fantastic, commenting on lived life while simultaneously communicating how a transient existence can be experienced unexpectedly. His poetry won the 2006 Frances Jaffer Poetry Prize from the San Francisco State University Poetry Center.

His photography is a structural dialectic of two or four frames and has been exhibited at Magnolia Editions in Oakland, SFSU and coffee-shops. While he worked as an administrator for a commercial art gallery in Laguna Beach, he installed a large dialectical photo montage nearby at the former site of a Wyland mural on Pacific Coast Highway during Memorial Day weekend. The montage questioned the nature of exoticism as an idyllic holiday retreat with frames of a crooked sublime beach stacked on top and beside surreal shadows of palm trees. The giclée was reinstalled several times, as passersby moved the board; once to a garbage can. A coworker told him that a homeless person eventually sequestered the art.

The favorite and perhaps most accomplished installation of his was at SFSU during his undergraduate years; an interactive journalism newsroom with a mass of scattered unrelated papers strewn on the floor created an ambience of ignorance from a media source that supposedly wasn't. The installation incorporated separate photographs with found objects from an abandoned newsroom desk. Each photograph was a portrait of a journalist within a confusing environment. The objects within folders and envelopes included anonymous threat letters, letters of correspondence, matches, story revisions, tea bags, photo slides and an expired bottle of Advil. The floor was littered with stock photos of past events. Viewers interacted with the exhibit by becoming investigative journalists themselves, opening and exploring envelopes and folders to gather information about the newsroom.

As a former writer, producer and multimedia editor for an online journalism publication, the most humbling lesson he learned was that there will always be people who are more knowledgeable about the news stories he disseminates. It is because of this that he prefers to effectively tell a story from a first-person perspective without the subservience of a narrator through streaming documentaries and audio narratives. He documented Bay Area subcultures including sex workers, anarcho-punks, tattoo artists and other eccentric artists. He worked under the assistance of his former professor Andrew Devigal who has since taken on a position as the multimedia editor for The New York Times, and collaborated on and produced several multimedia documentaries that focused on eccentric subcultures in the Bay Area.

His non-academic interests also lean toward subcultures that are music-based. In late 2007 he was featured on OC Weekly for donating roughly one-thousand demo CDs from punk, hardcore and indie bands; many of them do-it-yourself recordings, to KUCI, UC Irvine’s radio station. He acquired the CDs while volunteering at Koo's Cafe, a non-profit and all-ages music venue, for three years before the location shut down in 2003. KUCI and Koo's Cafe used to have collaborative shows which is why he donated the music to them. He kept a handful of demos from bands such as Xiu Xiu, Earlimart and Avenged Sevenfold that have had an insurmountable influence on the music scene because of their focus on experimentation, subject matter or both.

Besides Photoshop, Dreamweaver and Soundtrack Pro, he is also interested in and has informal experience with web applications partly because of his ten-year involvement with online communities. He recently became an "Elite" member for Yelp, an online database of user-generated reviews, with a niche for reviewing vegan and vegetarian restaurants. He also reviewed two vegan restaurants in London and one vegetarian restaurant in Paris for Qype, the European version of Yelp. He has maintained his own website, viewable at http://www.chrisgirard.com, since the beginning of the Millennium and has acted as an interim website manager for many different departments and programs, including the graduate program at Otis. He believes taking a stand against representation with digital media will play a huge roll in the future of art practice, and he hopes to continue to be a part of this ongoing movement.