VCU MFA Thesis Show

/// general view of the show ///
Special thanks to artists Jessica Dodd, Josie Lewis, Will Machin and Josh Bennett for their support with the installation.



 Twins / Cast light and cast cake / 2011
Produced by Stephen Williams

A Knife To Defeat The Night's Breeze / Ashes of a coyote / 2009-2011
Produced by Daniel Beckwith and Oscar Santillan
Special thanks to Verena Schatz, Alexa Leister-Frazier, Josie Lewis, and Stephen Williams

Juana Ines de la Cruz / Several beings with long hair / 2010-2011
Produced by Alexandra Barao
Special thanks to the participants: Melissa Lesh, Loie Hollowell, Georgi Ivanov, Emily Sydnor, Jackie Rhines, Renee Doorly and Jackie Picariello
And, thanks to Aileen Painter for her support with this work

Ornst / Cast of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, and something that expires on Yuri Gagarin’s birthday / 2011
Produced by Luke Harman and Alexa Leister-Frazier

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