Meet February’s Artists in Residence
Christian Ruiz Berman, Miles Greenberg and Tamara Santibañez
This month’s residency is generously sponsored in part by Hesty Leibtag and Terry Verk.
Christian Ruiz Berman
Christian Ruiz Berman’s work draws from histories of adaptation and migration. His painting practice dissects and understands the components of his experience and of his cultural and aesthetic legacy as a Mexican immigrant. His works address the surreal nature of being stuck between two worlds. Guided by his interests in architecture, memory, and storytelling, Christian creates layered and detailed works that explore illusion and depth on flat surfaces. Some works reference Mexican mythology, and some are based on malaphors, or mixed-up idioms, that nod to the confusion and inherent syncretism of the immigrant experience, but also a way to speak about the ways that abstraction and realism can be recombined to talk about a paradoxical universe.
His work emphasizes the idea that magic and surprise always happen as a result of shared experience, cross-cultural inspiration, and the subversion of established tropes and identities. Animals often take center stage in Christian’s work, acting as mischief makers, seers, and stewards of human culture. Christian’s work has been exhibited at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Missouri, the Green Family Art Foundation in Texas, the Mindy Solomon Gallery in Miami and at various galleries throughout New York, including Nicodim and Calderon Ruiz. Christian lives and works in New York.
Miles Greenberg
Miles Greenberg was born in Montreal in 1997 and is a New York-based performance artist and sculptor. His work consists of large-scale, sensorially immersive and often site-specific environments revolving around the physical body in space. These installations are activated with often extremely demanding durational performances that treat the body as sculptural material. These performances are then captured in real-time before the audience to generate later video works and sculptures.
At age seventeen, Greenberg abandoned formal education, throwing himself into four years of independent research on movement and architecture, which spanned a number of residencies in Paris, Beijing and New York. He has worked under the mentorship of Édouard Lock, Robert Wilson and Marina Abramović. The result of a rigorous, ritualistic methodology, Greenberg’s work follows self-contained, non-linear systems of logic that are best understood in relation to one another. Miles’s work has been exhibited at the New Museum in New York, the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, during Art Basel in Switzerland and at various galleries across the world. Miles lives and works in New York.
Tamara Santibañez
Tamara Santibañez’s work is rooted in storytelling and the visual language of identity construction, exploring subcultural semiotics, narrative terrains, and the meanings we make from visual signifiers. As a trans artist, their practice memorializes the tactics and resistance strategies used by “othered” populations to build alternative worlds. Employing oil painting, ceramic and leatherworking craft techniques, Tamara animates symbols and accessories of queerness and rebellion with the visual lexicon of Mexican artisanal traditions, creating punk tees from tooled leather, belts from Talavera pottery, and paintings that equally honor lotería cards and gay bar latrinalia.
In their practices as a tattoo artist and oral historian, they are fascinated by the body as a venue for archiving and accessing personal and collective narratives. Enlisting inanimate objects and architectures as stand-ins for human figures and relationships, they complicate the undulating exchange between power and vulnerability, otherness and assimilation, generational expectations and individual capability. Tamara’s work has been exhibited at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, the Riverside Art Museum, the American Museum of Ceramic Art, and at numerous galleries in New York and Los Angeles. Tamara lives and works in New York.
