Rose B. Simpson

Did that happen?

Oh, yeah.

Tell us about what's in your garage.

I have two custom cars that I built for myself in order to have an aesthetic experience.

What does that mean?

Relational aesthetics to me, when I was in graduate school the first time,

I wrote my thesis and I studied what indigenous aesthetic means, right?

And the closest I found was actually Japanese aesthetics that I was written about, and aesthetics of the everyday and the intentionality of all that we do and the applied aesthetics to our lived environment.

And growing up in Española, where the cruise line on Sunday is everybody getting in their nice car and you put on some good tunes and you lean back, and you are present.

you're enjoying your community, you're having a sense of self-worth, you're enjoying the sunset, you have a good drink from Sonic, right?

That feeling is actually presence.

And that feeling is when aesthetic gets reapplied to our life, and when we make those aesthetic decisions, that we are in a state of agency.

We're a state of empowerment in ourselves, right?

And so I was building myself to have that moment, to create that aesthetic experience for myself that I felt was reminiscent of what I knew of applied indigenous aesthetics.

where it's not in a white cube on a white box in some other building somewhere where you don't necessarily have access to.

It's for everyone.

Everyone has access to that experience.

I always wonder if I stop being an artist in the way that the world is arting, I would still be doing stuff.

I would still be going from one place to the next and making things constantly.

And I feel like I'm always interested in how I'm a dreamer.