Some new works

Map and Dust
Photograph
100 x 123 cm
2011




For Juana Ines de la Cruz, Five persons with long hair are somehow within the gallery wall
.
Their actual hair comes out at random intervals. By removing the caps, their hair is seen through five holes, being the only visible part of their body to the viewer. 

The participants come in and out from within the wall whenever they want and they stay or leave as they wish.


Juana Ines de la Cruz
Five beings with long hair
2010







Horn
Ashes, glass, and wood pedestal
2010




Strawberry Puddle
Photograph
100x67cms
2010




Statement - Contact info

The gap between the possible and the impossible, between reality and fiction, is the creative territory from where my practice departs.
The repertoire of strategies for exploring this terrain has, in recent years, grown to include means such as: deceiving looks (i.e. a blurred video image, not produced through digital manipulation, but through the action of breathing on the camera lens); complex processes producing simple results (i.e. a colorful photographic composition as evidence of the effects of pigments injected into my own seminal vesicles); and, elaborate visual narratives (i.e. the documentation of durational actions, edited into highly compressed videos or slide projections).
Then, these strategies interweave with topics, bearing a more intricate cartography. In fact, there are two very prominent topics in my recent works: masculinity, or more specifically, masculinity from the sensibility of romanticism, something between Thoreau and P.T. Barnum. The second issue is a more subtle one, which I am tempted to call “phenomenological ethics,” where a physical action in the world is, in itself, a political statement.
Within the map of my utopian desires, there is a device able to fill the gap between clocks and calendars, and a rebellion in which the crowd whispers their demands.

Contact: santillano@vcu.edu
Oscar Santillan is represented by dpm