Curtis Santiago Constructing Return

OPENING RECEPTION: 
Friday, September 15, 7:30 Pm
THE ARTIST TALK WITH THE CURATOR:
Curtis Santiago and Magdalyn Asimakis
Thursday, September 14, 12 Noon, Gordon Snelgrove Gallery

Some argue that to understand our present we must read deeply into our past. This may at times be merely a rhetorical gesture, while at other times a pedagogical volition. Stuart Hall wrote that there can be no simple return to the ancestral past without the acknowledgement of one’s presentness and the technologies and identities we utilize. How does one access the past through the present, and to what end? 

These are questions that run through the work of Curtis Santiago. Through drawing, painting, sculpture and video, Santiago instinctively moves between places and media to access his past in order to understand what Hall refers to as the ‘diasporic experience.’ This survey presents bodies of work developed in Canada, the United States, Trinidad, and South Africa that unpack the ways we look at and structure the past as a way of understanding the present. 

Santiago’s oeuvre negotiates history, genealogy, spirituality and imagination, and mobilizes traditional and new media to question and collapse temporal and spatial distance. In doing so, he locates the diasporic condition in unfixed space, negating colonial rationale.