Santino
Gonzales
http://www.santinogonzales.com
Orion in Spring
2019
5ft × 7ft × 3ft
Television sets, utility crate, VHS player, archival home-videos, Casio VL-Tone, boombox, reel-to-reel recorder, Language Master, suitcase, and antenna dish.
Evening Star
2019
3ft × 8ft × 2ft
Installation, Los Lunas, New Mexico. Handmade adobe bricks, television set, VHS player, and radio antenna.
A Monument to Static
2020
4ft × 5ft
Television, Banker’s Box, plastic wrap, handmade adobe bricks, and antenna.
Illuminated Earth
2020
1ft × 4ft × 1.5ft
X-Ray Illuminator, handmade adobe brick, Banker’s Boxes, and plastic wrap.
Earthshine
1ft × 1ft × 1ft
Security mirror, earth & hay from Los Lunas, New Mexico.
A Brief History of Crop Circles
2019
4.5 ft × 5 ft × 2ft
Installation & Video. Drone footage of a homemade 30ft. wide crop-circle built in Los Lunas, New Mexico using rope and wood with my father, Joe Gonzales, and narrated by my cousin, Sofia Romero. Installation contains two video monitors, two pocket radios, a medical table, and the wooden crop circle tool used to create the geoglyph.
Tinnitus
2019
7ft × 6ft × 5ft
Installation, San Francisco, California. Banker’s boxes, television sets, security mirrors, handmade adobe brick, radio transmitter, theater-light, VHS camera, speakers, and audio recording of footsteps on reflective silver
A Brief History of Crop Circles
2019
Drone photograph of a homemade 30ft. wide crop-circle built in Los Lunas, New Mexico using rope and wood with my father, Joe Gonzales, and narrated by my cousin, Sofia Romero. Installation contains two video monitors, two pocket radios, a medical table, and the wooden crop circle tool used to create the geoglyph.
Light Signals
2020. Performance Still, Light and camera under the full moon.
At home in New Mexico’s high desert, Ufology, adobe, and radio are fixtures embedded in the landscape, fueling my art practice. Together, my interest in these communication technologies assemble a complex visual lexicon with which I investigate broader underlying cultural attitudes regarding the fear of alienation and the desire for connection.
These points of contact are made evident in juxtapositions presented in my sculptures, photographs, videos, and installations—the crossing of ancient and contemporary technologies, the proposition of folk-epistemologies in times of uncertainty, and the overlap of the terrestrial and the extra-terrestrial. From these pressure points, and born out of lifelong interests, my art practice connects me to my Mestizo ancestry, a familial history of adobe building, and a space where the scientific and the supernatural collide, giving way to artworks that function as beacons, broadcasting expansive definitions of borders and the alien.
Santino Gonzales is an artist from New Mexico who explores the relationships between Ufology, radio, and adobe to investigate broader cultural attitudes regarding the fear of alienation and the desire for connection. He builds artworks across media that seek to function as beacons, broadcasting expansive definitions of borders, and the alien. Gonzales received his BFA from the University of New Mexico in 2012 and will be receiving his MFA from California College of the Arts in 2020. Tino is currently working out of California, building adobe, making crop circles, and transmitting secret radio stations.