Exhibition: December 15-19

Curtis Talwst Santiago is in Santa Fe, spending the week in afternoon diorama workshops with NMSA's 11th and 12th grade students to conceive of and create small worlds, an exhibition of miniature, condensed dioramas that reflect a self-proposed narrative by each student. small worlds will be on view in the Axle Contemporary gallery from December 15 through December 19. The educational partnership between SITE Santa Fe and New Mexico School for the Arts offers New Mexico youth learning experiences and exposure to professional artists and creative problem solving that impacts students lives for years to come.

Santiago's work is included in the current SITE Santa Fe SITElines biennial, Casa tomada. He will be speaking at SITE at 2pm on December 15th, before the opening of the student work.
 

Curtis Talwst Santiago (b. 1979 Toronto, Canada; lives in Lisbon)
Over the last several years, Santiago has been creating dioramas inside of ring boxes. Inside of these small spaces, Santiago constructs environments that are intimate and performative; the artist has carried them around to show visitors one on one, opening up a scene in the space of his hand. These mobile enclosures are a way of transporting carefully constructed scenes that include specific people, places, and histories.  For Casa tomada, one gallery contains a glass house in which a selection of 51 dioramas appear together in a singular installation.

From a recent article in The Santa Fe New Mexican's Pasatiempo by Grace Parazzoli:

To create his art, Santiago uses a wide array of media — everything from plastic to hair. On his use of varied media, but also perhaps speaking implicitly to his works as a whole, he said, “Anything has the potential to be something larger than it is when you bring it down to that scale.”