BEYOND RECONSTITUTION:  A digital collage project by Morgan Santander



ARTIST STATEMENT:

Beyond Reconstitution is a dialogue about culture, both present and past. Images from this work are meant to break down our pre-conditioned perception of cultural and historical hierarchies as well as our accepted social environments. The work manipulates and disrupts our limited and relative historical perception. Historical perception has always been manipulated and altered to favor the status quo of power. Traditional pictorial passages in Beyond Reconstitution are challenged and reconfigured to create new and meaningful narratives. The work thrusts our knowledge of the world onto the realm of the beyond. With the dawn of our millennium upon us, we find ourselves inhabiting a world where our existence embarks on and reflects upon a tenebrous sense of survival. We are living a moment of transit. Beyond Reconstitution is where space and time converge to produce complex figures of difference and identity. In this new world order, the beyond, we find ourselves suspended within a cascading flux of cultural and historical exchange. Disjointed fragments from these exchanges mold and constitute our understanding of the world. They also influence our perception of representation, or misrepresentation. Once the original is altered within the mind’s eye, can it ever be re-perceived within the author’s or history’s original restraints or jurisdictions? Must the unfolding dialogue on culture, history, and society, be deconstructed and/or restaged in order that it be revitalized and brought to the forefront of our self-understanding?

BIOGRAPHY:

Mexican born artist, Morgan Santander, has lived and studied in Mexico, Wales, and the United States. Santander received his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the University of California, Berkeley, on an Academic Merit Fellowship. Santander’s Masters of Fine Arts degree was completed while on a Board of Trustees Merit Scholarship at the University of Chicago. Morgan Santander’s paintings and drawings have been exhibited widely throughout the United States and Mexico. Santander has also participated in group shows in the United Kingdom and Ireland. Many of his paintings and drawings can be seen in private, public, and corporate collections throughout Mexico, the United States, Germany, and the United Kingdom. Morgan Santander currently serves as Professor of Painting at the Savannah College of Art and Design.