In this ongoing video project, which began in 2005, the artist has created vignettes that collage seemingly disconnected images and video footage with Esquivias’ poetic narrations. The short chapters that comprise Reads Like the Paper provide cursory glimpses into an imaginative space that the artist has carved out for reflection and speculation about generalized and specific quotidian events that comprise our lives.
In a typically concise artist’s statement Esquivias describes Reads Like the Paper (2005 – ongoing) as “a series of short videos which accumulate unclassifiable details from quotidian situations in order to present issues which I am concerned and curious about.” Employing deadpan wit, off-kilter comic timing, and a precise, yet seemingly casual aesthetic approach, Esquivias’ modest short films privilege a somewhat melancholic world-view, underscored by a prevailing sense of doubt.
Describing Reads like the Paper, Cecilia Alemani writes that Esquivias “often uses her laptop’s screen as an experimental stage: The artist films her own computer, overlapping unusual characters with short videos—a sort of virtual theater of the absurd. Merging low-tech devices with an intimate, humorous approach, Esquivias’ shorts chronicle quotidian events, mixing wry irony and skepticism to transform the materials into strange, almost philosophical reflections.”