New Videos


The Telepathy Manifesto / Video loop / 2011
Performing: Daniel Beckwith and Oscar Santillan
Camera: Alexandra Barao and Stephen Williams



Cascade / Video loop / 2009-2011
Produced by: Josie Lewis and Daniel Beckwith



The Cannibals / Video loop / 2011 / in collaboration with artist Signe Schmidt
2011

Statement - Contact info

The gap between the possible and the impossible, between reality and fiction, is the creative territory from where my practice departs.
The repertoire of strategies for exploring this terrain has, in recent years, grown to include means such as: deceiving looks (i.e. a blurred video image, not produced through digital manipulation, but through the action of breathing on the camera lens); complex processes producing simple results (i.e. a colorful photographic composition as evidence of the effects of pigments injected into my own seminal vesicles); and, elaborate visual narratives (i.e. the documentation of durational actions, edited into highly compressed videos or slide projections).
Then, these strategies interweave with topics, bearing a more intricate cartography. In fact, there are two very prominent topics in my recent works: masculinity, or more specifically, masculinity from the sensibility of romanticism, something between Thoreau and P.T. Barnum. The second issue is a more subtle one, which I am tempted to call “phenomenological ethics,” where a physical action in the world is, in itself, a political statement.
Within the map of my utopian desires, there is a device able to fill the gap between clocks and calendars, and a rebellion in which the crowd whispers their demands.

Contact: santillano@vcu.edu
Oscar Santillan is represented by dpm