Walk to the wide open window at Selenas Mountain

Walk to the wide open window
Tamara Santibañez
April 22 - June 10, 2023
Opening Reception: Saturday, April 22, 6-9pm

I know just the window that brick should go through, 2023
Oil on wooden panel, terra cotta tile, latex paint
24.25 x 22 x 4.25 in
61.59 x 55.88 x 10.79 cm

Selenas Mountain is pleased to present Walk to the wide open window, an exhibition by Tamara Santibañez. In the artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery, Santibañez builds upon their multifaceted studio practice with a presentation of new works created, nurtured, and conceived at Miami’s renowned Fountainhead Artist Residency. Thoughtful explorations of material and form meet subcultural semiotics in a dexterous display of world-building.

In the iconic book Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, author Jose Esteban Muñoz states that “we must strive, in the face of the here and now’s totalizing rendering of reality, to think and feel a then and there.” In other words, we cannot change the future unless we can envision something more positive and sustainable than the present. Tamara Santibañez puts this directive into play in their imagining of new possibilities through visual storytelling.

The exhibition poses questions that are geographic and architectural in nature: if there is a better world, what does it look like? What lives there? What structures, armatures, and barriers separate us from it? What do we glimpse it through? Across several artworks, Santibañez incorporates elements of hostile architecture, gateways, barriers, locks, and keys, continuing an interrogation of access and allowance in the built environment.

FULL PRESS RELEASE HERE.

OHMA Exhibits - Opening April 29th

We invite you to join us at the opening celebration for this year’s interactive oral history exhibit, which will mix online and in-person, synchronous and asynchronous. As in the past few years, most of our students have created virtual exhibits, which will go live at 5PM on April 29. From 7-8PM on April 29 we will have an open house-style online event where you can congratulate students and chat with them informally about their work. In the weeks following this opening, each student will be holding at least one live event, ranging from listening parties to soundwalks, in-person and online. Stay tuned for registration details for these. You can register now for the April 29 opening - registered participants will receive the link to the exhibits by 5PM on the 29th.

Our students are creating this year’s exhibit in a moment of cautious venturing out. In New York City, spring is coming, and withdrawing, and coming back. We are now allowed to take our masks off in class, but many are keeping them on. We noticed that, in this moment, our work engages with the dynamics of inside and outside. 

How much of our internal realities can we, or should we, share externally through oral history processes? How can oral history help us to understand and to cross boundaries - political, social, material, linguistic?

REGISTER HERE for the opening celebration.

OUT OF STEP / OUT OF LINE at Long Beach Museum of Art

Out of Step / Out of Line

April 9 – June 26, 2022

In the tattoo studio, artists are called to perform; clients request their hand to illustrate a pre-conceived idea, approved and transferred from carbon paper to skin. In their studio practice comes the freedom to move out of line, to work without expectation, and explore different mediums and subject matters. Co-curated with San Pedro-based artist Nathan Kostechko, this exhibition examines the latter— artists who navigate a fine line between an external perception of their work via tattooing, and their own interests, backgrounds, and cultural heritage that inform a wider practice. Many of these artists have helped pave the way for others with multi-faceted creative work in today’s contemporary culture.

Participating artists: Daniel Albrigo, Emma Bagley, Shawn Barber, Shay Bredimus, Bryan Burk, Scott Campbell, Danie Cansino, Matt Carignan, Aron Dubois, Gianni Gigliotti, Don Ed Hardy, Mat Hurtado, Coulter Jacobs, Jesse Jaramillo, Nathan Kostechko, Chris Martin, Matt McCormick, Mister Cartoon, Shizu Saldamando, Tamara Santibañez, Cheyenne Sawyer, Zac Scheinbaum, Derrick Snodgrass, and Carlos Torres.

Out of Step / Out of Line is exhibited in the Josephine Molina Gallery at LBMA Downtown.

REBEL IRREVERENCE at Selena's Mountain

Rebel Irreverence
Tamara Santibañez
October 25 - November 22, 2020
Opening reception: Sunday, October 25, 1-6pm

Tamara Santibañez
That rainbow that is also a bridge, 2020
Oil on canvas

Selenas Mountain is pleased to present Rebel Irreverence, a solo exhibition by New York based artist Tamara Santibañez. Due to the unique circumstances of the pandemic, Selenas Mountain invited the artist to utilize the gallery as their studio for two months leading up to the exhibition. This is the gallery’s first physical exhibition since temporarily shutting our doors in the Spring. Known for their abstract leather landscape oil paintings, Santibañez’s studio practice has blossomed into a multi-media oeuvre employing their own unique language and symbolism. For this exhibition the artist has created a body of work spanning painting, drawing, sculpture, textiles, ceramics, and leather work. 

In the book “Subculture: the Meaning of Style,” author Dick Hebdige presents a semiotic analysis of punk which describes the function of subculture as being a metaphorical resistance to hegemony. With a similar anti-authoritarian and semiotic lens, Tamara Santibañez creates bold artwork that carries a unique visual vocabulary. The artist juxtaposes subcultural signifiers with traditional fine arts and craft techniques. In each work is a subtle or hidden metaphor for rebellion. *The title for the exhibition “Rebel Irreverence” is a reference to a powerful line in a Zapatista communique which sheds a hopeful light on the act of revolution.

Recalling the work of Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, Santibañez explores the art-historical depiction of the Calla Lilly, often seen in Rivera’s murals carried by faceless female figures crushed by large bundles of this flower. The artist’s representation of the flower describes class oppression and a whisper of revolution, a subtle call to arms. Depicted in both their painting and ceramics, Santibañez explores the symbolism of the Calla Lilly in contemplation of the labor of revolution—the practical work that must be done for revolutionary change—and who bears the burden of that labor.

Santibañez further explores the symbiosis between labor and revolution in their replications of traditional talavera Mexican pottery. The artist pairs traditional techniques and motifs with a more modern contemporary punk, fetish style. The result is a collection of objects that are charmingly defiant and anachronistic. The works speak to the value of the labor of the crafts-person and the championing of personal liberty while also exploring a quest for queer utopias and queer futurism.

Working more overtly with metal and punk imagery, the leatherwork pieces by Santibañez have a relic-like quality to them. They carry both gracefulness and hardness. The visual language of metal band t-shirts and back patches is engraved in monochromatic tooled leather. The primal aura of these works references both the collective in ancient cultures and the pack mentality of contemporary subcultural alliances. 

*“The international of hope. Not the bureaucracy of hope, not the opposite image and, thus, the same as that which annihilates us. Not the power with a new sign or new clothing. A breath like this, the breath of dignity. A flower yes, the flower of hope. A song yes, the song of life.
Dignity is that nation without nationality, that rainbow that is also a bridge, that murmur of the heart no matter what blood lives it, that rebel irreverence that mocks borders, customs and wars.
Hope is that rejection of conformity and defeat.” —EZLN, First Declaration of La Realidad for Humanity and against Neoliberalism, 1996

MAD MUSEUM FELLOWSHIP

New York, NY (January 23, 2019)

The Museum of Arts and Design (MAD) is pleased to announce the Winter 2019 session of its Artist Studios program and Artist Fellowship. The selected artists, who will work in MAD's sixth-floor open studios from February 5 through August 4, 2019, are Jamie Boyle, Rachel Grobstein, Anthony Iacono, Tamara Santibañez, Maryam Turkey, Brigitta Varadi, and Chang Yuchen. Santibañez is this cycle's Artist Fellow.

LANDSCAPES at JTT GALLERY

Landscapes

On view through February 17

JTT is pleased to present an exhibition of paintings by New York-based artist Tamara Santibañez (b. 1987, Atlanta, GA). Collectively titled Landscapes, these grayscale paintings depict the supple folds and sensuous undulations of leather garments. Magnified creases, peaks and puckers conspicuously evoke bodily forms and, at the same time, underscore the absence of the wearer. In effect, the abstraction of these biomorphic forms precludes associations with identity or gender, and serves to complicate our conventional associations with desire.

Articulated with a devout sensibility, Santibañez leather paintings call to mind subcultures that have been historically codified as deviant. In the United States, communities around leather, BDSM, and other non-normative sex practices sprung up in the fifties and sixties in urban centers as a reaction to social repression. Moreover, queer women who formed their own communities were rejected by the gay leather scene and by factions of feminism who accused BDSM of replicating structures of oppression. Santibañez’s attention to these subcultures is located in their capacity to undermine oppressive power structures and in doing so, open up new avenues of empowerment and agency.

LUNA Film Series

March 23 & 24 - REVOLT/RESTRAINT: How We Refrain
Curated by Audra Wist
Friday, March 23 & Saturday, March 24, 7-10pm
Artists: Deborah Stratman, Lex Brown, Brook Hsu, Tamara Santibañez, Audra Wist

This two-day program presents a screening on March 23 of The Illinois Parables (2015) in 16mm by internationally renowned artist and filmmaker Deborah Stratman, with the artist and curator in conversation. A “reading” series on March 24 entitled ARTISTS READING SOMETHING ________ IN THE BACKYARD with four emerging artists Lex Brown, Brook Hsu, Tamara Santibañez, and Audra Wist . In addition to the screenings/presentations on Saturday, artists will form a discussion panel entitled JEANNE DIELMAN’S RESTITUTION that focuses on their work and scholarship regarding power relations, the status of women, and canon development lead to the need for ways of challenging normalized phallocentric ideas.