Jaime Carrera

I came across Jaime’s videos maybe a week or two ago, when my good friend Pino showed me a video of a struggling musician in an over-dramatized music video showing a bearded guy with a guitar wonder the streets, collecting coins from the ground and playing in an empty venue. Of course Pino was drooling over the guy, however I was quite disgusted by the shallowness of the piece and went on a rant about how bearded guys are being worshipped for nothing else but their facial hair and how this is equal to a woman being worshipped only for her tits. As well as, how most of the artists using bearded dudes in their art, just use it as a convenient excuse to get cock.

It shouldn’t be a surprise that the video by Jaime Carrera isn’t concentrating on multi-layer-techniques and symbols, since he is mostly a self-taught artist who has never studied art formally. And yet, despite that fact and despite the overflowing drama, the overall impression of his videos is rather visually pleasuring than infuriating.

Jaime Carrera was born and raised in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. At 17, he moved with his parents to Kansas, finished high school and initiated his interest in photography by learning to develop and print film in a community college course.

He relocated to Chicago in 1997 to pursue an art career and within a year he began exhibiting his work professionally, beginning at the Around The Coyote Arts Festival. Mr. Carrera now lives and works in Minneapolis, where he had his first solo show, Domestica, at the Flatland Gallery in 2002. Since then, his artwork has been shown at various galleries and spaces, such as Intermedia Arts, Rogue Buddha Gallery and Outsiders And Others Gallery.

He recently returned from a month-long tour of the eastern U.S. with the band Faggot.