Jonathan Santoro
Courting Bench. Wood, MDF, latex paint, cast urethane plastic, cast resin, Ikea glasses, and cast rubber.
Volume: Where do you live / where do you work?
Jonathan Santoro: I currently live in Philadelphia and for the past three years I’ve had a studio in a warehouse space in Kensington. From 2007-2010, this studio space was home to the Philadelphia Institute of Advanced Studies, or simply P.I.F.A.S. This is how I was originally acquainted with the space and how many people in the city remember it. Currently, the building houses around 20 artist studios.
Volume: What’s your day-to-day studio schedule like?
JS: My process ranges and each day can be different, but generally each object is fabricated through some odd combination of material. Each piece starts with either a general hypothesis about certain materials and their potential flexibility, or an observation of how one of these products reacted with another by pure accident. Beyond studio experimentation, I binge-watch hours of tangentially relevant youtube tutorials that demonstrate various casting methods. This is teamed with hours of scrolling content featured on Cos-play and prop forums, which also focus on some of the same materials and methods, though to entirely different ends. The information I process during these research sessions never directly matches any of the projects I am contemplating, but fragments of these demonstrations consistently inform my work.
Volume: What influences your practice outside of the studio?
JS: The work I have been recently making deals with an architectural uncanny. The models I construct are generally selected from an index of stock household items and other generic interior referents. Beyond the influence of my own living space and the mundane objects cobbled there, classic stories by E.T.A. Hoffman and Edgar Allan Poe have recently been insightful to my work. These masters of the uncanny often attribute a psychological dimension to the settings of their stories and in these personifications anthropomorphic fantasies and/or mental distortions animate the objects surrounding their characters.
I also find constant inspiration from film. Recent screenings at the International House have reintroduced me to the work of Federico Fellini. I discovered Fellini when I was a teenager and haven’t really watched many of his films since. His short film “The Temptations of Doctor Antonio” was particularly great. I grew up in a very Italian- American household and although my family was not very religious, they perhaps had traces of Catholicism through the guilt and shame that is bred in that sort of culture. This film humorously addresses that sort of trouble in morals.
Volume: Whose work have you been looking at lately?
JS: Carl D’Alvia, Ben Mendelewicz, Guy de Cointet, Rachel de Joode, Jacques Louis Vidal,
Sarah Lucas, Wharton Esherick, Eric Stanton, Christopher Forgues, Pierre Klossowsky,
Guy Bourdin, and vintage Jean Paul Goude.
Volume: What was the last show you saw in person that really changed your work?
JS: I am not sure if it changed the way I was working in any direct way, but the exhibition
Christopher Knowles: In A Word at ICA Philadelphia was simply enchanting and
greatly inspiring. Particularly his performance of “The Sundance Kid is Beautiful.” Set
within his own artwork, Knowles put on a 60 minute performance where he danced to
Harry Nilsson’s “Jump into the Fire” repeatedly, referenced his collaborations with
Robert Wilson and Philip Glass, tuned his portable radio in nostalgic glee, drank a soda
during a reflexive intermission, and closed out with Elton John’s “Philadelphia Freedom”
blaring over the P.A. system. It might sound like a grab bag in my retelling, but it was
truly a gift to witness.
Volume: What kind of work are you currently making?
JS: Tim Belknap and Ryan McCartney of Icebox Projects asked my partner Meredith Sellers
and I to curate a show in the gray space in the Crane Arts building. With its multiple
shades of gray, four obstructing columns, and six massive curtained windows, the gray
space has a commanding presence not common to many art exhibition spaces. Rather
than attempt to alter the peculiarities of the space with white paint and florescent lighting,
we are making the room into something that will resemble a black box theatre with
artworks from 10 artists punctuating the space. The show is called “Chewing the
Scenery”. This title was chosen off a list of antiquated stage terms and is used to refer to
an actor who is overacting. We selected works that had an overstated ambiguity about
them in order to present a unique narrative propelled by the juxtaposition of objects we
are pooling together for this exhibition.
Beyond logistics and object selections, I am building exhibition furniture that will go
beyond general support structures and will activate further dialogue between works and
emphasize references to theatrical staging.
Chewing the Scenery opens March 10, 2016 and more information can be found here: