The Skirt
llegando a tierra (fantasy island)
Solo Exhibition: Giancarlo Montes Santangelo
Opening Reception: Saturday September 10, 4 - 8pm
“Going ashore”, 2022, archival pigment print
Ortega y Gasset Projects is pleased to present the opening of llegando a tierra (fantasy island), a solo exhibition by Giancarlo Montes Santangelo. An Opening Reception will be held on Saturday, September 10, 2022 from 5 - 8 pm.
Utilizing a mixture of archival images, collage, and portraiture, Giancarlo Montes Santangelo presents an immersive iteration of his continuous body of work, fantasy island, a project spanning colonial histories, memory, and the artist's own body and familial history. Looking at images produced in Argentina, Puerto Rico and Spain around the turn of the 20th century, he explores the essential role these images play(ed) in the process of nation building–revealing imperial relationships and, through closer examination, photography’s slippery relationship to history and truth. Montes Santangelo is interested in the ancestral trauma and the normalization of violence and abuse that occurs through these narratives, and how the psychic aftermath of colonization lives in the body.
For this exhibition, Montes Santangelo focuses mainly on imagery from Puerto Rico. His work mixes subjects that are found and that are staged, overlapping the make believe and the real, and blurring truth to create tension. On the wall, the artist’s images, his family’s images, public archival photographs and materials, and texts of all kinds weave in and out of each other. Historical events become wrapped in the personal and vice versa. Through interventions with collage and portraiture, Montes Santangelo creates new worlds in which to respond to and understand these traumas, and describes the ways in which healing is wrapped into frameworks of decolonization. Concurrently with the Skirt Space exhibition, Katya Grokhovsky will present a mixed-media exhibition titled Point A: Chapter One, opening in the Main Gallery the same evening.
Artist Bio
Giancarlo Montes Santangelo, native of the DC Metropolitan area, graduated from SUNY Purchase in 2018 with a BFA in photography. In 2019, Giancarlo exhibited his photographs alongside Paul Mpagi Sepuya and other collaborators as part of the Whitney Biennial. In 2020, he published his first monograph, "Improvising Sight Lines" with Monolith Editions – a book that weaves together images and writing and is held in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the MoMA. Giancarlo was recently awarded the Aperture x Google Creator Labs Photo Fund and completed residencies with Tangent Projects and TILT Institute for the Contemporary Image. He photographs and collages in an effort to map out where he comes from and where he wants to go. Collaged photographs bring together the artist’s own body and staged scenes against archival images.
