BIRTHDAY GURL VIDEO ARTIST
OFFCIAL WEBSITE:https://birthdaygurlvideo.wixsite.com/lauragracerobles
Dear Diary Here's where i start collecting the different bios ive written for myself overtime here's another
when the years pass id like to see how this turns out
when the years pass id like to see how this turns out
Laura Grace Robles is Birthday Gurl a San Antonio video artist who takes the anti film making approach to presenting moving imagery to become Anti-Art film as a contradictory to cinematography. By superseding the camera B Gurl manipulates video, by using real time video performances and video synthesis. Robles explores the anti film making process which she derives from her methods stated in her Anti-Art film making manifestos of conceptual ideologies. B Gurl forges film genre innovation by encouraging, taking risk by igniting and beginning an anti film genre, that breaks traditions as visual media art. The artits’s unconventional film making manifestos such as the Acid Film Manifesto, Junk Film Manifesto, Fake Mockumentary manifesto and Counterfeit film manifesto which B Gurl pays homage to the UK New Punk Cinema movement honoring, Dogma 95 and Pink 8 to be apart of the new punk cinema movement. In 2016 Robles and Fabrizio Federico founded The Straight Jacket Guerrilla Film Festival, an online festival that unites Texas and The United Kingdom by representing a collective of unhealthy films that irresponsibly aim to destroy Hollywood. Robles uses video installation and single channel projection to showcase her Anti-Art Acid films during live musical performances by her musical project Anti-Beauty and other national acts like Hip Hop Legend Rakim, the Producer of The Strokes and Grammy winner Marcel Rodriguez Lopez keyboard player of the Mars Volta. She has also showcased her films by sharing the stage with Com Truise, The Octopus Project and Machine Drum. Birthday Gurl has appeared in two foreign anti art films titled Pregnant directed by Fabrizio Federico and Mondo Lizard a film about anti film makers directed by Rubber Cripple both directed in the United Kingdom.
dear diary here's another bio from 2020 as i continue to document my life it brings me strength and self worth thank you
Laura
Grace Robles started out playing lead roles in high school theater—
like Katherina in Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew and the title role
of Mary in The Insanity of Mary Girard by Lanie Robertson. Laura
performed alongside her mother, a theater director who put her in charge
of long, important rehearsals during her time of pregnancy near
preparing for school shows for a room of nearly a thousand students.
Laura was awarded All-Star cast on two occasions for her performances in
district and area rounds of the annual University Interscholastic
League One-Act Play competition for Kennedy High School.
Besides Theater, Laura was active in many other extracurricular activities such as student council, Varsity basketball, Sophomore class presidency, and San Antonio Youth Literacy, just to mention a few. This is where Laura first learned to use a VHS Camcorder, roaming the school for inspiration for her first music video assignment that she ended up organizing, in the middle of the street in front of her house, using a group of neighborhood kids that became the perfect outsiders to match the Guns and Roses song “Civil War” in 1997. When Laura graduated from High school, she was awarded many prestigious scholarships from The Lulac Foundation, The Hispanic Heritage Foundation for Leadership and Community Service, and Coca Cola for academic excellence.
Before Laura graduated from high school, she became motivated to find success as a theater camp reject who would eventually fail at film school and drop out to direct her first short film, a “Pulp Fiction” parody which she entered in a film contest created by Michel Gondry, one of her favorite directors. Unfortunately, Laura failed to fit with the other actors and film students due to the silly requirements she refused to take part in that clashed with her experimental and random avant-garde nature.
Besides Theater, Laura was active in many other extracurricular activities such as student council, Varsity basketball, Sophomore class presidency, and San Antonio Youth Literacy, just to mention a few. This is where Laura first learned to use a VHS Camcorder, roaming the school for inspiration for her first music video assignment that she ended up organizing, in the middle of the street in front of her house, using a group of neighborhood kids that became the perfect outsiders to match the Guns and Roses song “Civil War” in 1997. When Laura graduated from High school, she was awarded many prestigious scholarships from The Lulac Foundation, The Hispanic Heritage Foundation for Leadership and Community Service, and Coca Cola for academic excellence.
Before Laura graduated from high school, she became motivated to find success as a theater camp reject who would eventually fail at film school and drop out to direct her first short film, a “Pulp Fiction” parody which she entered in a film contest created by Michel Gondry, one of her favorite directors. Unfortunately, Laura failed to fit with the other actors and film students due to the silly requirements she refused to take part in that clashed with her experimental and random avant-garde nature.
BURGER BITCH PULP FICTION PARODY BY LAURA GRACE ROBLES
In 2007-2008, Laura moved into a 700 square foot studio that she turned into a live-in gallery and photography studio with no shower or kitchen. The artist continued her artistic explorations while enduring a Drama class she felt compelled to take at the time even though she knew changing her major to Drama after flunking out of Radio, Television & Film was a runaway effort to fulfill a dream her mother had of Laura becoming a famous actress. Instead, she became an obsessive vegan pseudo sumo wrestler named Yo Apples who fell in love with Bjork so much she almost became a Bjork impersonator herself, while surviving on a pudding mix made from Smart Water and rice protein powder .
Laura soon realized she wanted to make moving paintings from poetic visions of moving imagery contrived from NON ordinary footage that would resemble distorted abstractions of masked human identity. Laura used large-scale video installations with single-channel projection that would fill the entire space. The video installation consisted of a combination of broken mirrors found on the street while walking home from voice class, which became the point of projection for the infinite reflections of shapes, vivid shadows and mirrored light. Video feedback was produced from a cheap camcorder via a projector which Laura purchased with her entire student loan as the fun alternative for buying school books. The entire studio gallery was masked with a design of mixed-media that used many layers of additive and heavily painted white and clear shower curtains held together by the dried paint and random broken mirrors in a way that expressed the embodiment of multiple surfaces transformed into an atmosphere that created a mystical dream-like experience for a small visiting audience that became the spectators of an intimate display of performance with guitar playing and modern dancers, costumed in painted clothing where the painting of one another became the improvised choreography and movement. This performance maintained an ongoing pretense of reality for the entire opening night. This investigation took place at Blanco Studios, skating-distance from the college she attended. The entire piece was eventually documented and turned into a long sequence of moving imagery which became the visual poetry interactions titled “Discovery Mirror”.
WATCH DISCOVERY MIRROR LIVE PROJECTION HERE:
https://www.facebook.com/lauragracerobles/videos/110589432350910/
READ ARTICLE HERE
http://theranger.org/2007/11/02/thriving-art-community-encourages-participation/
This experiment was an expression of lyrical gestures that became embodied art—a blue wig holding the skeleton of what was left of the broken mirror and frame, in a hugging position with her torso as though it were a part of her—an encapsulated dream reenactment. A vessel to her soul was uncovered.
Robles studied painting for seven years at San Antonio College where she took her first Sculpture and Drawing II class with Mark Prittchet. At this time, she participated in multiple juried student exhibitions where she was the first art student to be selected to exhibit six paintings for one show. Robles was determined to venture out with her first solo exhibition where her paintings from the Additive and Subtractive process were collected by the office of President Ricardo Romo from The University of Texas at San Antonio.
After this major accomplishment, she became the only artist from Texas and other surrounding states to be invited to attend the private reception and lecture for The Gates exhibition by Christo and Jean Claude in New York’s Central Park.
Robles’ studying Art at The University of Texas at San Antonio with Leslie Raymond, a well-respected Art professor, video artist filmmaker, VJ, and critically-acclaimed Executive Director for the Ann Arbor film festival, opened up a whole new world of artistic expression that would eventually be the dedicated dream she felt destined to fulfill despite any obstacles.
At that point of study, Laura became inspired to incorporate her theatrical intuition to create an avant-garde study of self-actualization by identifying as a divine archetypal figure that would erase social class through a dance of body, devising a reenactment of the Turkish Bath, costumed as a Red Individual, a character Laura invented to transform herself.
The film was titled “In The Green” and was presented as a combined study of research and exploration, showcasing digital photography, theater, performance art, video and animation costumed as A Red Individual. The film was awarded first place in the category of Multimedia at the university’s College and Liberal Arts Spring Research Conference in 2006.
Laura mostly fantasized of living in the past during the underground guerrilla No Wave cinematic explosion of DIY street culture from no wave and punk rock musicians and artists of the Lower East Side of New York.
Laura continued to pursue performance art experimentation even during a period of homelessness and on no budget, determined to direct films at no cost in order to live the dream of emerging as a highly regarded, DIY punk rebel avant-garde video artist. She allowed herself to be used as the subject of her video works and worked alongside a dear friend and model she took painting class with, Victoria Campbell, and talented community actor, Sam Mandelbaum.
This led to her public and spontaneous guerrilla performances on San Antonio’s River Walk as Lucky the clown and as a Red Individual, locked in a porto potty for thirteen hours sans clothing in the spirit of Contemporary Art Month at a location set up with many porta potties to be used as impromptu art galleries.
Among other endurance and public nude guerrilla acts of street art she directed by implementing her fake documentary film making manifesto for a film series mocked after the name Foxy and other words, she presented 16 different versions of the same 54 minute mock-performance to blur theater and performance art in short experimental takes of video art exploration, proving BA-HACK-ANANA—a fate of Bananas hacking into computers that came from a mystic cyber space of dream reality that manifested as a fake documentary faking what's fake in order to deliberately not be a fake documentary but the deconstruction of it.
Laura has approached the idea of conceptualizing a number of her films using her Anti Art-Art film making manifestos such as the Fake Mockumentary Manifesto, Counterfeit Film Manifesto, Junk Film Manifesto and Acid Video Art Film Manifesto—all of which pay homage to Lars Von Trier's Dogma 95 and Fabrizio Federico's Pink 8 Manifesto.
Robles eventually gave herself an official moniker that would inspire one of her many alter egos—Birthday Gurl Video Artist, a San Antonio native, experimental filmmaker with a name that let her fall in love with a toy birthday princess tiara she put on to make herself feel special and young. This name would define her identity as a dedicated artist practicing a career of party-gurl mentality to have fun, get crazy and cry when disrupted from escaping reality. The artist felt that it was her destiny to instinctively celebrate her imagination as though every day was a time to embrace new gifts of creativity as if it were her way of being reborn again and again.
At this point of long-inspired bodies of work, Laura developed somewhat of an internet presence on YouTube. This enabled the artist to emerge in public as a video artist for the first time with video installation and single-channel projections for highly-regarded national and international acts for 80s hip-hop legend Rakim, Grammy Award Winner Marcel Rodriguez Lopez of the Mars Volta, and Gordon Raphael, the Producer of The Strokes. She has also opened shows for Com Truise and The Octopus Project, exhibited in San Antonio's top gallery, Presa House Gallery, and The South Texas Museum of Pop Culture, and other venues, and participated in several underground street happenings.
PRESA HOUSE GALLERY LAURA GRACE ROBLES ANTI-BEAUTY:http://presahouse.com/portfolio/june-2018/
Watch LIVE PROJECTION FOR RAKIM HERE:https://www.facebook.com/lauragracerobles/videos/1036334736443037/
Column: Gordon Raphael #28 - January 2011
18 Jan 2011
update: for some reason, gordon’s in texas! he hangs out
with barefoot 18 year old musicians and artists! he’s found a load of bands he
wants you to hear! and it’s brilliant to have him back. read article here: http://www.rockfeedback.com/magazine/detail/column-gordon-raphael-28-january-2011
Laura's love for this No Wave Era of guerrilla film expression led to the founding of The Straight Jacket Guerrilla Film Festival, alongside Fabrizio Federico, United Kingdom's underground punk film legend and pioneer rebellion that forged the PINK 8 Filmmaking Manifesto. A manifesto that paved the way for many filmmakers to take risks. This became the style of films this film festival was encouraged to showcase in an attempt to destroy Hollywood's cage of standards that stifles many artists with dreams of movie making.
Later on a United Kingdom directors Fabrizio Fe3derico and Rubber Cripple featured Birthday Gurl performing and talking about her films and film making philosophies in a feature foreign film titled Mondo Lizard A Guide To Gonzo CInema, a film dedicated to anti-film making pioneers that have proven themselves to be the rebels of DIY guerrilla film making.
The rebirth of the Anti-Art Art Film label for avant-garde and experimental cinema are true experimentalism that allows moving imagery the significance of freedom of interpretation and cannot be easily defined but are more of a spiritual media.
With this in mind, Birthday Gurl poses to herself a challenge to explode her creativity as a resource for the unlimited boundaries she sets for herself by her imagination, transforming ideas based on dream interpretation, using digital video as a way to distort the world with psychedelic rainbows that do not yet exist and that remain hidden beneath the pop diversions that infest the masses in order to supersede the camera she's always dreamed of having.
Unique
traits: New Punk Cinema Avant-garde Cinema Experimental Video Art
Moving Imagery Anti-Art Art Film Acid Pop Video Art Film Dream
Experiments
