Today we’d like to introduce you to Pedro Lavin

Hi Pedro, thanks for joining us today. We’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.

I was born and raised in Mexico City. I spent the first 18 years of my life there and developed a large part of my identity and aesthetic sense based on the cultures of Mexico.

I left my country in 2009, at 18 years old, to study graphic design at the California Institute of the Arts. Following my graduation I moved to New York to work at Psyop, a studio specialized in high end animation for the advertising and film industries, for 7 years. I completed my education there. CalArts provided the basics of my craft: an understanding of visual language and design; while Psyop gave me a comprehensive education in narrative storytelling and cinematic vocabulary. Being a part of Psyop’s creative team also allowed me to understand the process behind VFX, and the power post production has to bring unreal worlds to life.

Around 2017, I began to feel like my true voice was being quieted by my sole focus on commercial work and I realized I wasn’t allowing myself the space and time to develop a unique artistic perspective. I ached to create work that felt more purposeful so, in 2020, I made the decision to continue my commercial career as a freelancer. I then began investing my newly acquired time, focus and resources into self-generating work that held deeper meaning.

In retrospect, that has been one of the most valuable decisions I have ever made. I have since created numerous films and artworks of increasing complexity, which have accelerated my creative growth as an artist and filmmaker and have given my life a profound sense of purpose. Through these works, I’ve discovered fascinating mythologies that have put me in contact with my cultural lineages and revealed previously unexplored facets of myself. I’ve had the great fortune of collaborating with some of my favorite artists around the world, who have helped me build a new cosmology and body of work that I feel immensely proud of.

It’s thrilling to realize that this is only the beginning. I’m filled with an almost feverish excitement for the multitude of ideas and projects I have in store for the coming years. I eagerly look forward to seeing how they unfold and what new secrets they reveal.

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?

It certainly hasn’t been easy.

Being an artist comes with great challenges. From a financial perspective, it is difficult raising funds for art, particularly for work that falls outside the mainstream. In my own case, frustrations with securing funding for my work have led me to mostly (with a few generous exceptions) finance it myself. While this has been a very liberatory pursuit and has allowed me to create exactly the work I want to create, it has also placed limits on the scale of the pieces I can make at this point in my life. My ambitions are big but my budgets unfortunately aren’t. I am hopeful, however, that one day soon this will change.

Additionally, the emotional toll of artistic creation is significant. My fear of failure can be paralyzing, leading me to set unreasonable standards for myself and triggering an intense perfectionism. Additionally, because my work is so personal and draws so directly from my own experience, I am constantly revisiting past traumas and opening deeply personal facets of myself to the public. I recently got my first hate comment, in fact! It was jarring, but it also made me feel a strange sense of achievement. I think being an artist is learning to be comfortable with both public scrutiny and the potential of public failure.

I am acutely aware, however, of how lucky I am to be an artist and I cannot think of a more fulfilling path. Creating work in a voice that feels mine has given my life purpose. During periods in which I wasn’t generating work from a place of honesty, I felt a sense of aimlessness and futility that was only counteracted by realigning my priorities and returning to a more honest mode of creation. Additionally, I feel a particular responsibility in 2024—a time when we’re worryingly seeing LGBTQ+ rights reversed—to continue creating work that challenges the mainstream with transgressive, queer narratives that show us as complex and magical beings.

Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?

I am an artist and filmmaker. My work takes many forms, but it’s primarily expressed through experimental film, in both traditional live action and computer generated forms. My practice explores the mysticism inherent in desire; portrays homosexual identity through mythological and nature-based metaphors and describes fantastical journeys of self-metamorphosis.

I’m probably best known for my most recent short film titled ‘La Pequeña Muerte’, completed in 2023. It tells the story of two lovers sharing a night of ecstasy while, in another world, a dancing god mirrors their passion with an orgiastic dance. Through the film, I explored perennial themes present in my practice: desire, ritual and fantasy but also incorporated my Mexican lineage and investigated how it intersects with other facets of my identity. During 2023 and 2024, the film was selected by and awarded at over 25 film festivals internationally—including some of the world’s premier queer film festivals such as OUTFEST and Queer Screen—which allowed me to show my work to a wider audience than ever before. To date, I would say this film and its success is my proudest achievement.

I currently have multiple pieces in development. This new phase of my practice continues to investigate queer identity but looks towards Pan-European faerie folklore for inspiration. In these recent pieces fairytales, with their many associations to subconscious desires and a primal connection to nature, have been reimagined as modern fables. With these works, I’ve brought forth a rich inner world inhabited by characters pulled from folklore but recast as avatars of queer pathos and liberation.

By virtue of being queer and steeped in eroticism and sexual identity; my work inherently exists in conflict with the status quo and sets me apart. I seek to unflinchingly represent my lived experience and explore the beauty and pain woven into my community’s collective mythos; which often leads me to challenge prevailing heteronormative paradigms. But by delving into the rich tapestry of the queer imagination, I hope to uncover profound stories that have historically been marginalized and employ them to craft creatively daring and challenging works.

Can you tell us more about what you were like growing up?

As a boy, I was always happiest in nature, exploring the wild woods and decaying adobe ruins that dotted the Mexican countryside near my home. Layers of history were all around me as I grew up, surrounded by hundred year old oak trees, sleeping volcanoes and abandoned haciendas, long colonized by native cempasuchil flowers. This surreal, Edenic environment early on imprinted on my young mind; allowed me to develop a rich, personal cosmology; and heavily influenced my identity and work to the present day.

At night, when I returned home smelling of wildflowers, I would read voraciously. I saw myself reflected in the deities that populated the mythologies I devoured. In those stories, characters obscured distinctions between male and female, human and spirit, floral and faunal. They effortlessly traversed between realms and identities; demonstrating how fixed boundaries could be made permeable and revealing themselves as transgressive and inherently queer. I was fascinated by their fluidity, which I now recognize as the origins of my own queerness.

Although I wasn’t a lonely child, I greatly valued moments of solitude. I would spend hours losing myself in the forest or hidden away with a book; all the while immersed in fantasies and dreams. This time spent alone allowed my creativity to flourish. My mind was free to wander and create fantastical worlds inspired by the books I read and the beauty of my surroundings. These imagined realms were then brought to life through drawing and paper sculpture, giving physical form to the dreamscapes and spirits that populated my inner world.

In many ways, my artistic practice today remains an extension of this childhood exploration. It has undoubtedly matured and evolved, becoming more textured and complex as new facets of my identity are unearthed but the impetus behind it has remained strikingly similar to that of my young creative drive. My work has always been about giving palpable form to the nebulous abstractions of my psyche and it will likely always be inextricably linked to the natural splendor of my home and the metaphorical power of fantasy.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://pedrolavin.com
• Instagram: https://instagram.com/wolf_venus
• Other: https://vimeo.com/user74227147

Image Credits

Headshot Photography: Renata Souza

Images 1 – 4:
Direction and design – Pedro Lavin
Lighting and rendering – axonbody

Images 5 – 7:
Photography, design and compositing: Pedro Lavin

Image 8:
Direction and design: Pedro Lavin
3D modeling: Joe Chang
3D printing: Makelab

All images courtesy of the artist