José Seoane,
*1956 Santiago de Cuba
Curriculum Vitae
As a painter and installation artist, I am interested in investigating ideas around transculturation and identity within the post modern condition. My work extends from the gallery into site-specific spaces that include interactive interventions and large-scale murals.
My current body of work explores how physical and symbolic ‘walls’ evoke of the struggle of the migrant’s attempt at integration and re-invention while traveling between Western and non-Western cultures. Acting as barriers or fortresses, sanctuaries or prisons, these symbolic spaces at the same hide and expose our adopted past, while providing the surface upon which we incorporate elements and simulacra our old lives in a constant act of re-invention and re-evaluation. The resulting visual language is formed through stratifications of elements, foreign to each other yet cohesive, and evokes past and present, permanence and transience, absence and presence, belonging and displacement, the worldly and the spiritual.
Since moving to a border town, I have begun to explore how the thematic and symbolic treatment of wall spaces can be expanded to examine the idea of border culture. Much like the migrant experience, there is a distinct conflict of identity when two separate social and economic cultures share a separate but identical geographic space. In a border culture one is pulled toward ‘the other’ by virtue of convenience and need, repelled/attracted by differences, and separated by the barrier or wall. My research reflects the interplay of geography, object and spectator/actor in the perpetual act of perception, creation, recreation and re-evaluation.
© José Seoane 2010