Santiago Cucullu: Creaks and Shafts, ‘A hungry feeling came over me stealing,’ or, strange people in strange places.
October 2007 – September 2008
2007 Wells Fargo Atrium Series
Argentinean-born artist Santiago Cucullu’s work includes large wall drawings, sculptural installations and works on paper. His sources, although varied, are often based on material found in the Federación Libertaria de Argentina (FLA), an anarchist library in Buenos Aires. Mining these historical references, Cucullu surveys the deep and often conflicting events of the forgotten lives and places of Argentina and considers local history versus a broader, less-defined historical understanding. Cucullu maintains an improvisational freedom that stems from combining more than a dozen individual images to create a single artwork. His compositional choices are often made on site while installing, adding yet another element, a performative one, to the mix that includes the traditions of drawing and painting.
Frequently alluding to political imagery, most notably the early anarchist movement of his native Argentina, Cucullu's sometimes harsh physical images are blended with illusory, unknown forms, contrasting the ideas of reality, fantasy and history. Cucullu’s work constantly sources his own photographs as well as the work of other artists, illustrators and the news media.
The large-scale wall drawing Creaks and Shafts, ‘A hungry feeling came over me stealing,’ or, strange people in strange places, occupying the south wall of the Art Center’s atrium, references the conceptual framework of an installation the artist completed several years ago. This earlier piece attempted to link the use of street barricades from various political conflicts with the 1957 one-act radio play written by Samuel Beckett, "All That Fall." For the installation at the Rochester Art Center, the artist imagines a sociopolitical and psychological scenario in which fanatically religious owners of a thrift store attempt to accumulate a week’s worth of neighborhood refuse—easy chairs, couches, desks, chests of drawers—to construct a makeshift barrier between themselves and the rest of the world. As they rummage through the disregarded material of their surroundings and frantically construct their barricade, they begin to believe a psychic attack, propagated by their neighbors, is imminent. As their isolation and paranoia builds, the shop owners increasingly view passers-by as potentially threatening and meet them with looks of disgust. As the physical and psychological wall between themselves and others expands, so does their isolation, intolerance, and abhorrence of others. Not unlike words and ideologies, the components of Cucullu’s installation could be considered neutral in isolation, but become reactive when used to create a boundary between people.
Cucullu’s work has been shown at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the 2004 Whitney Biennial, the Henry Art Museum in Seattle, and the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, as well as various international venues including the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, and the temporary annex of the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in France. The artist lives and works in Milwaukee.
About the Artist
Santiago Cucullu (b. 1969, Buenos Aires, Argentina) grew up outside of Washington, D.C., but spent time each year visiting Argentina. Cucullu attended the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, Minnesota (MFA 1999), and Hartford Art School, Connecticut (BFA 1992). His awards include residencies at the Glassel Core Program, Houston, Texas (2001-2002), and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine (2001-2003), as well as the Jerome Emerging Artist Fellowship, from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design (2000). His work has been exhibited at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota (2003); Hammer Art Museum, Los Angeles (2004); Whitney Biennial (2004), Henry Art Gallery, Seattle (2005). Cucullu lives and works in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.