It's time for another installment in our series first-person story of San Diego and told in their own voice. Claustrophobia arachnophobia acrophobia those are extreme or irrational fears of small places spiders and heart. Shinpei Takeda is an artist filmmaker and founder of a San Diego-based nonprofit. As part of the first-person series they tell us about exploring phobias in his latest exhibit. My name is Shinpei Takeda I am an artist and I am doing this exhibition called 'Fobias' at Mesa College Art Gallery. People have very different ideas about irrational biological fear. If you run into something that you have hyperventilation and anxiety attacks and all of those I do not have those but the ones that I have heard I understand a little fear for deepwater for example when there is one person who had [Indiscernible] and another person who had the fear of death which I think it's kind of a universal thing. By putting into words sometimes it is easier to externalize it a little bit. It turns out that people use so much imagination and use so much of the creativity and imagination power to think about I hate deepwater because every time I hit crossing the bridge every time I think about going into the water and the water going into the car and I can't get out and I think -- I keep going down. So it's very magical. Now I am thinking that my proposal perhaps will be that Xena phobia for example against Mexicans or immigrants. Think they are curious about that. They are very curious about them. First the exhibition started at Mesa College Art Gallery and I had nothing there and I wanted to complete a new project and see how much I can do. The first few days I felt this kind of attempt which is kind of what I call phobia office and the first week people made appointments and he would sit with me inside this kind of office tent structures. And we just talk for one hour. That was an important part of the process because nowadays the communication is really messed up. I thought it was first interesting to just use it. For me it was nice to just listen to different people stories and their resiliency and overcoming these things or trying to face it and their imagination and the things that they are afraid of the and the things we are so possessed with. Nice to attend to it and look at different dimensions so these things that we call phobia things we do not often talk about so much. I will write one of the phobias from the phobia list as many strange names. [Indiscernible] and then I transferred it to the root. Hopefully posting these could liberate something. For me and trying to overcome my fear is my motivation for my art production. I knew I wanted to do something like this but I did not want to touch this. That nobody else is talking about it I should. Made during an exhibition and this time. It is very timely and very important because it's an important role because of communication that is really messed up. It is very essential to our feelings and a communication methodology so I thought that was very important for me. That was Shinpei Takeda who has an exhibit at the Mesa art gallery to three Thursday. --
Shinpei Takeda is an artist, filmmaker, and a founder of the AjA project, a San Diego-based nonprofit.
In his latest exhibit Takeda explores phobias. The exhibit is titled "Fobia," which is the Spanish word for phobia and is a more general term, Takeda said.
Takeda interviewed 30 people about their phobias to create the exhibit. He had each participant write down part of the name of the phobia and then enlarged it and used it to carve out the phobia name on wood blocks that he later used to make prints.
"It was nice to listen to different peoples stories and of course their resiliency in overcoming these things or trying to face it and their imaginations in how much they actually think about these things that they are afraid of. I'm starting to think the things we are afraid of we are actually obsessed with in some way," Takeda said.
The exhibit is on display at the San Diego Mesa College Art Gallery through Thursday.
As part of our First Person series, Takeda tells us about exploring phobias in his latest exhibit.
