about the work
Gettysburg Address, 2006-2008
A Minute of Silence, 2008
Jonathan Santos’s yellow police tape is printed with the text of the Gettysburg Address in Morse code. The final line of Abraham Lincoln’s speech dedicating the site of an American Civil War battle calls to mind the questionable causes of the current war in Iraq: “We here highly resolved that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” Placing the text in a new context, Santos conflates our current sites of military activity with crime scenes and draws parallels between victims of violent crime and those who have died in battle.
His piece A Minute of Silence is an imagined point of view of soldiers as they fell dying in the battle that began the American Revolution. Both Santos’s works in this exhibition acknowledge and memorialize the soldiers involved in the horrors of battles past and present while addressing our contemporary relationship to public sites and war memorials.
about Jonathan Santos
Jonathan Santos is a multi-disciplinary artist whose site-responsive work ranges from stenciled markers that triangulate mapping, statistics, and fatal street aggression to collapsible sculptures that explore the function and dysfunction of blue poly tarps in the contemporary culture of impermanence.
He has been awarded a Public Art, Architecture, and Design Grant from the LEF Foundation and EdCo Research Grant from the Boston Architectural College. He has been an artist-in-residence at the MacDowell Colony and the Vermont Studio Center, and has attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture with a full fellowship from the William and Marguerite Zorach Foundation. He has collaborated on art projects with various urban-youth art programs, such as Artists for Humanity, Dot Art, and the Cloud Foundation. He teaches at Massachusetts College of Art and Design.
Recent activities include: Jeff Hailey Gallery, New York, NY (summer 2008); Hopeless and Otherwise, Southern Exposure, San Francisco, CA (2008); Interruptions: Art as Social Practice, UCSC, Santa Cruz, CA (2008); Stencils: Public Space and Social Intervention, NESAD, Boston, MA (2007); Don’t Know Much About History, artSPACE, New Haven, CT (2006); Peekskill Project, Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art, Peekskill, NY (2006); Social History of Objects, Triple Candie, Harlem, NY (2006); Thread Counts Project, G.A.S.P., Brookline, MA. (2006).
For more information, please visit www.jonathansantos.net.
