SANTOS

STATEMENT

My interest lies in transformation, as I reflect on fleeting childhood memories and my family’s immigration to Canada as an autobiographical point of departure. Experiences as history, fragmented into memory, and re-told to become personal myth are negotiated through the act of drawing, one that operates in narrative, and in fiction. This is the realm of play where I situate my work.

Notions of attachment/separation, being grounded or uprooted, ultimately relates back to investigations of ‘self’ and ‘home’ and are explored through an invented temporality (where I look forward, sideways, upside down, while simultaneously looking backward into a history never physically lived) manifesting in conceptual hybrids and multiple distribution of selves.

In these recent works, imagery arises from the otherworldly; figures mobilize and embrace growth, transience, and a self in process that provide loopholes as points of entry that makes aware the contradictions that dwell, and do not seek to resolve awkwardness and discomfort.

It is in ambiguity and lack of absolutes that I draw upon my imagery; one that supports a narrative that is disjointed, accumulative, and plural. It has become a language in my own story telling that continues to change and evolve, a language that is constantly being defined by the relationship of one image to the next.

We like precariousness.