Flatfile » Santina Amato »

Location: Chicago, IL

Website: santinaamato.com

Untitled (Dough Project Self-Portrait)

Untitled (Performative Sculpture 1)

This edited documentation of Untitled (Performative Sculpture 1) shows its performance on opening night. Dough is placed inside the suspended pipe, to spill out from either of its end. One end allows the dough to fall into a sunken bucket which then disappears from sight. On the other end, it is anticipated that the dough will cause a domino effect, flipping over the second bucket containing wheat paste to create a spill onto the platform. The total duration for the performance was 90 minutes.

Green Room

This video series appropriates amateur pornographic content collected off the Internet. Focusing on amateur porn allows for the professionalization of the industry to be removed & a supposed view into what is actually happening within the closed doors of private homes is seen. Through the fragmentation, processing and consumption of the image that represents the intimate act of sex, a re-contextualising of the original video into abstracted forms & movements, asks the viewer to renegotiate the meaning of the original & reflect on the psychosexual nature of relationships between couples in an attempt to further understand gender dynamics within society at large.

Blue Room

This video series appropriates amateur pornographic content collected off the Internet. Focusing on amateur porn allows for the professionalization of the industry to be removed & a supposed view into what is actually happening within the closed doors of private homes is seen. Through the fragmentation, processing and consumption of the image that represents the intimate act of sex, a re-contextualising of the original video into abstracted forms & movements, asks the viewer to renegotiate the meaning of the original & reflect on the psychosexual nature of relationships between couples in an attempt to further understand gender dynamics within society at large.

Untitled (Performative Sculpture 2)

Amato_Santina_08 Amato_Santina_09

 

‘Activated’ during a critical mass of viewership on opening night, Performative Sculpture II was stuffed with freshly made dough in a back room and placed into position by gallery attendants for the audience to witness its journey of rising or birthing. This work considers the building as body, the dough as bodily fluids & creates possibilities of direct interaction with the architecture of space while claiming the area by disrupting the space on the other side of the wall. Amato’s Performative Sculpture series are in direct dialogue with Gordon Matta-Clarks “building cuts” which re-conceptualized preconditioned roles & relationships.

Re-Performing Sculpture

Created during Artist-In-Residence at ACRE, Wisconsin, this series of sculptures are specifically created from a domestic material (ceramics) in a size that considers its relation to the human body. The aim of these sculptures is for them to be ‘maintained’ after each dough performance. Eventually, they will carry the scars of their previous performance on their unglazed surface.