REFRAME

ARTIST STATEMENT

July 5, 2025

One day, I was on Skid Row—surrounded by seven rival gangs and a phalanx of police—and a few years later I found myself in Echo Park, stepping into my first artist residency. It felt dangerously long then; now it feels sudden, almost shocking.

Time is a strange thing.

I’m overwhelmed with ecstasy. Through every studio window, trees unfurl their branches. The world outside is quiet and peaceful: birdsong drifts in, and the air is sweet with oranges, lemons, and flowers. My host, Martin, left this morning to photograph the new metro‑station murals—his enthusiasm for public art felt like a benediction.

I’ve been accepted for my first residency on the strength of my project REFRAME, a living map of creative thriving. It’s far more intricate than my earlier Apple Portrait Project—instead of a single medium. I work bilingually (Français–English), ambidextrously, across collage, ink, found objects, overlay stencils and more.

REFRAME is rooted in resilience and self‑inquiry: each daily A4 journal page, made in anywhere from thirty seconds to thirty minutes (mostly 30 seconds-No chance to fail at creating something any given day), traces memory, emotion, and transformation.

My process is informed by long‑standing practices in meditation, somatics, and trauma‑informed creativity; I explore the tension between control and chaos, solitude and sharing. I see art as both archive and altar, where grief and joy, identity and impermanence all converge in the act of making.

REFRAME began as a three‑year multimedia journal (2005-2006-2007), a hand‑crafted cartography of healing, struggle and wonder. The big life phases—marriage, its falling apart, divorce—set the stage. Then came the liminal six‑month “legal buffer” after my divorce in California, the unexpected roller‑coaster when ten thousand of us gathered at the L.A. Convention Center: I handed over my green card, watched it shredded before my eyes, nearly panicked at the thought of losing status. Then took an oath alongside thousands of new citizens. Today I’m “one of them,” and that fierce mix of fear and relief still pulses through my work.

Now, I’m focusing on a new experiment: superimposing semi‑transparent stencil letters—solid black, white, colors or rainbow‑hued affirmations—over past journal entries, inviting fresh perspectives on old memories. Each layer reads like a mantra, a celebration of sovereignty:

YES – Nous – Oui – We.

ALIVE – "I remember: I’m not late. I’m alive."

JOIE – "Je ne veux pas seulement réussir, je veux danser. "

With REFRAME, I offer an open‑ended map: a space where collage, text, sketches, found ephemera, and personal myth can interweave, and where every viewer—and every page—may discover their own path toward resilience, wonder, and creative freedom.

Last year, I said goodbye to my 99-year-old grandmother with Alzheimer’s. Now, I am learning to accompany my mother as she is fading out in dementia.

This project honors the imperfect, the in-process, the raw, holding fragments of lived truth—absurd, tender, spiritual, and fierce.

The residency will allow me to ground decades of process into a unified, sharable expression of creative thriving. I see the residency as a vital portal—between eras, continents, voices. I want to prepare this work to be seen, to become a bridge.

This is an invitation: to grow up, show up, clean up, and open up—together.

Lucas Cyril Plouviez