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.
In 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”.
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. 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 porta 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 filmmaking 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 filmmaking 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.
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 director with the alias Rubber Cripple
featured Birthday Gurl 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
