Laura Camila Medina and I met in grad school, where we were immediately drawn together as video artists within a painting program. Both then and now, she and I chat off and on, troubleshooting technical issues, sharing memes, and occasionally discussing theoretical elements of textiles, animation, and other interrelated topics.
Lately, we’ve been chatting about display technologies and watermedia while working on shows that opened in October of this year. On the occasion of her latest show, Ceremony for the Winged, on view at Nationale in Portland, Oregon, and my latest show 100% ENNUI, showing at Ivester Contemporary in Austin, Texas, we saw an opportunity to collaborate with our respective regional art publications to make our conversations both more in-depth and more public. You can find the reverse of this interview on Texas’ Glasstire here.—Lauren Klotzman
Lauren Klotzman: When we shared our thesis show’s gallery, we were so ambitious, but we had really different ways of dealing with fatigue and perfectionism.
Laura Camila Medina: I will absolutely work up until a few hours before everyone’s gonna be in the space.
LK: Video makes you that person, right? With video, neither institutions nor artists budget enough time, really.
LCM: Totally. The amount of folders and subfolders that exist in my digital sphere is insane.
LK: I was hoping we could talk about the proximity of video and fabric.
LCM: Oh my god, there’s so much there!
LK: I know. It’s SO much. But, as you know, people love to talk about textiles and computing. But not enough people talk about textiles in terms of video.
LCM: Yes! It’s partially the type of fabric. This piece (Ceremony for the Winged, 2025) has chiffon, silk chiffon, and silk. But the chiffon—as a more synthetic material—has a tactile, fuzzy feeling to me, it’s so CRT [Cathode Ray Tube]-coded.
LK: TOTALLY! And I’m thinking about the specific TV that you had at Yale. It was a really huge, static-prone CRT, always VERY fuzzy.
LCM: I was honestly on the verge of being electrocuted by that thing. If at any moment I messed up a connection, it literally shocked me.
LK: I’m not surprised to hear that, but, you know… We’ve both had our… little zaps.
LCM: Has anyone ever written about CRTs and touch?
LK: Maybe you can?
LCM: Maybe that’s my next venture.
But like you were saying earlier, there is this connection between weaving and coding, and that discourse is so correlated to tactile ways to register a pixel. In this regard, I’ve also been painting on this fabric with watercolor, and it’s acting like certain papers do, where they register every single layer of painting individually. Even though it’s just one layer of fabric, it’s almost as if it were composed of multiple transparent layers.
LK: Yes! As in, if you made a fabric version of Photoshop, it would be three different sheets of fabric.
LCM: Exactly, exactly! And it’s almost holographic!
I’ve been painting with fabric already stuffed with polyfill and sewn, so it has this roundness and curvature to it, like a CRT screen.
There’s something magical about the way the layers of light and the way the projector’s distance registers pixels come together at Nationale. It reminds me that I was recently reading about research for LED technology that studied the scales on butterfly wings.
I’ve always been fascinated by butterflies. The wings have a structural coloration that is so digital. I’m fascinated by the way that something so prehistoric is related to the digital, to the screen, to projection, and then obviously to light.
LK: A butterfly’s wings and its growth patterns follow Fibonacci sequences, no? They spread out in those forms, and you get these fractal pixel-spirals.
LCM: Yeah! Which, you know, I love a spiral. I’m literally in those massive webs. Everything is connected!
I fear sometimes that I am in this echo chamber. It feels so infinite, like I could continue exploring and learning forever, but…
LK: Low-key, we are in an echo chamber called Earth. A planetary echo chamber of: everything is built out of matter, and matter, for the most part, operates in the same ways.
Earlier, we were talking about the layers [in your works] being like Photoshop and your use of watercolor, and I thought about my viewing notes from your video Busco todos los caminos que me conduzcan de nuevo a ti (2025). I had written down: “This video is giving pages, not just screens, like leaves of paper turning.”
LCM: Wow… Wait, what part?
LK: Well, I was thinking about this “possible world” you speak of in your artist statement, and thinking about a context of literature, timescales, and storytelling.
LCM: Okay, yeah.
LK: I like this term you use, “possible worlds.” It’s nebulous, but really concretized here by using virtual reality software (Unity) to make the work. “Possible worlds” are the nature of virtual environments, but also of storytelling and literature.
There’s the local specificity of Laura Camila Medina, the cultural memory of Colombian immigrant experience, and the cultural history of Central Florida.
LCM: Hmm…
LK: There are many sheets to this story: sheets of paper turning virtually, and then the physically draped sheets of silks and chiffons. But to me, the screens combined are books, these combined pages.
LCM: This feels like a very special observation, because sometimes when I’m composing my videos in After Effects, I am thinking about books and pages. I hope that the show’s installation functions similarly to those sensory books for children, especially in the way they have all of these different materials.
LK: Like Pat the Bunny!
LCM: Yeah, exactly! Virtual immersive experiences exist in this genre of books. They are physical experiences alongside text and narrative. Texture is concretely embedded within the story. You’re given this opportunity to feel the story with your own hands. I think a lot about that experience.
This experience of the handheld is related to my research with miniatures; via moments of touch, one can imagine oneself rescaled into miniature size and become part of what one holds.
I also think about the portability of a world. My fascination with specific Colombian miniatures is because sometimes they are the only thing to take with you when you leave Colombia, not knowing when you may return.
They are often seen as souvenirs, but for people living abroad, they mean so much more. Through the object, that landscape, and what it means to you, travels alongside you. The entire landscape of Colombia, and regions within it, becomes portable and yours. They can teleport you.
LK: Miniatures are incredible. I recently held a figurine from my childhood, and it felt like time travel!
LCM: It’s such an important part of my research, the miniature, and this type of animation that is possible when something exists at that scale. I could literally go on forever talking about it.
LK: Regarding miniatures, your last show (El Encuentro) was shared with Cecilia Vargas-Munoz at The Luminary in St. Louis. How was that experience of co-producing and co-exhibiting with her, and how might it be working through your exhibition at Nationale?
LCM: Cecilia is a miniature master ceramicist from Pitalito, Colombia, with whom I conducted an apprenticeship. I found out about Cecilia while I was doing research on chivas. I was taken by how specific hers were, because I was used to a very formulaic style. Then, I found out she was the originator of this one pervasive object, and that is the object that I specifically came across in my whole life.
LK: And that’s the vehicle, right? [The vehicle] that makes a cameo in the video, Busco todos los caminos que me conduzcan de nuevo a ti? (2025)
LCM: Yes! It’s a bus. Back then in Colombia, they built bus bodies out of wood over a chassis imported from the United States. They had long benches and open windows, no glass or anything. Cecilia’s chivas depict this type of wooden bus with people and their belongings. These miniatures have collectively traveled millions of miles. The intended distance of any given bus has been superseded by its miniature version exponentially.
LK: They’re flying buses!
LCM: Literally! I was really moved by something that Cecilia wrote. She “gave the chivas wheels of clay, and they grew wings.”
For St. Louis, I made a piece called everything becomes small from up here (2025). I didn’t want to be yet another person to copy her work, so I made this double-faced flying vehicle. It’s made completely out of very lightweight fabric, floating above the ground. You walk in and see all of these paintings on silk and chiffon, and the projection that’s coming through the windshields. It’s from multiple vantage points, all layered. The fabric brings certain qualities and possibilities to an object.
Here, the digital, for me, is made so physical, and vice versa. That physicality allows a seeing of multiple layers at once, the way I can when I’m working in software.
LK: You’re throwing the qualities of virtual working space into 3D IRL space.
LCM: Yes, totally. But also, I wanted there to be the sensation that it could go in both directions at once: that there was no front or back, there was no beginning or end, or that the only possible direction to move was forward.
LK: Time as a spiral?
LCM: Exactly. In the video, you virtually travel up a 3D scan of a hand sculpture I made. You go up, then fall through it, then fly back up and see everything in this bird’s-eye view.
A lot of the components that are seen are physically installed in the space. I often 3D scan objects, bring them into Unity, and create this sort of rotating cast of characters.
LK: I love that these “possible worlds” and a personal cosmology of objects come together in both the virtual spaces and the IRL spaces. They have this really cohesive language where one is being included in these worlds of various scales.
LCM: Yeah, I love a world with multiples. Especially multiple scales.
LCM: In St. Louis, you could be in my piece, look through the chiffon, and see Cecilia’s at a smaller scale, at a distance. That was really special; she was really taken by it.
A lot of the successes of this “bus” really informed the piece at Nationale. A lot of the process of sewing the different panels of fabric and attaching small “amulets” was learned through making the piece at the Luminary. The work at Nationale has a lot of those components; it’s getting more complex, and that’s certainly on display.
I’ve always referred to the way I use post-production in my videos as “video collage.” It’s extremely intuitive. I don’t work from storyboards or plan my videos out. I just bring in files from an intense array of subfolders containing scans, photographs, archival things…LOTS of different things, and I’m just responding.
As we say, it’s responding to the composition as if it were a painting. Like, I’m just placing things along the composition, whether it’s digital or physical, and it’s just… It’s magic.
Laura Camila Medina: Ceremony for the Winged
Nationale, Portland, OR
On view until January 3rd, 2026