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.