At first glance, observers would have no idea the cartoon-like figures hanging in Seton Hill’s Jodee Harris Gallery are tied to discussions of immigration and the use of digital technology in art.
To artist Josias Figueirido, that is precisely the point.
Figueirido, a new assistant art professor at the university, began curating the body of work — titled “The Garden Ladders” — while working at Texas A&M University in 2022.
“I was teaching students in Texas who crossed the border every day of class. They came from Mexico in the morning, came to class and then they went back to Mexico in the evening,” said Figueirido, who came to the United States in 2014 after growing up in northern Spain. “It was so interesting for me. I have never experienced anything like that.”
Talking to his students about their lives, culture and goals for studying in the U.S. led Figueirido to develop the characters shown in the exhibit — including Piri the Dreamer and Flying Coyote.
Drawing on the various definitions of “dreamer,” Piri represents an undocumented minor who traveled to the U.S. with a vision of hope for the future. Flying coyote represents a human smuggler taking people from Mexico to the U.S., Figueirido said.
“Although they are very cartoony and playful and all my paintings are about friendship and community,” he said, “they come from me looking into personal experiences, biographical events and learning about immigration while I was teaching in Texas.”
‘Looking for something new’
Figueirido’s artwork extends beyond the airbrushed canvases and decals hanging on the gallery’s walls and windows.
By scanning a QR code situated at the entrance to the exhibit, viewers can watch Piri the Dreamer and Flying Coyote travel throughout the room through the lens of a smartphone. The digital 3D model moves as the user scans their phone across the space.
Figueirido has experimented with 3D modeling in his artwork for about three years, using it to craft designs before airbrushing it onto a canvas.
“I’ve been painting for a couple of decades. I think I was looking for something new,” he said. “I wanted to kind of surprise myself. I wanted to create a way of painting that was unexpected to me.”
This is the first time the university has exhibited art that incorporates interactive technologies, said gallery Director Emily Franicola.
Experience in digital technology will benefit all Seton Hill art students, Franicola said — particularly those pursuing art education degrees.
“The more techniques you have under your belt and the more technology you’re well-versed in, I think the stronger you will be in being able to diversify how you teach students in your own classroom,” said Franicola, who came to the university as an instructor in 2018.
“By having all of these tools, they’re not only able to streamline their own process of how they work and how they make, but they’re also able to give students different perspectives of how to attack a problem.”
AI in art
Although some are frightened by the implications and future of tools such as virtual reality and artificial intelligence, Figueirido welcomes it with open arms.
He has shown his students how they can have a conversation with OpenAI chatbot ChatGPT to flesh out their artistic ideas or describe one of their paintings to an AI image generator and compare the two works.
“I feel very lucky because in art, we can test things out without consequences. We can test AI and see how that may make us think about ideas,” he said. “In other disciplines — in science, medicine — they have to be more careful because (of) the consequences it can have on people.”
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Figueirido is wary, however, of AI thinking and creating on its own.
“I’m not so much interested in that,” he said. “I’m more interested in AI as a collaborator and as a tool that I can enforce ownership. I want my art to be mine.”
No matter how the technology evolves, Figueirido is confident traditional art mediums will maintain their value.
“Painting has been with us for thousands of years. Throughout history, a lot of critics thought that painting was dead — especially in the 60s with performance, video, the camera. People thought ‘Why bother painting? We have a new way of creating images now.’
“But painting is so interesting,” he said, “because it seems to me painting absorbs the new strategies from technologies and incorporates those strategies within its own process.”
Quincey Reese is a TribLive reporter covering the Greensburg and Hempfield areas. She also does reporting for the Penn-Trafford Star. A Penn Township native, she joined the Trib in 2023 after working as a Jim Borden Scholarship intern at the company for two summers. She can be reached at [email protected].
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