Making-Thinking in the Visual Arts A Visual Art and Art History Speakers’

Marigold Santos pursues an inter-disciplinary art practice that includes painting, drawing, sculpture, tattoo, and sound. Her work examines notions of heritage and cultural identity, folklore, motherwork, and decolonization, and are presented within the otherworldly. Her paintings, drawings, sculptures, and tattoo work explore self-hood and identity that embraces multiplicity, fragmentation and empowerment, as informed by diasporic experiences. She holds a BFA from the University of Calgary, and an MFA from Concordia University. She is a recipient of grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, and the Conseil des Arts et des Lettres du Québec, and was long-listed for the prestigious Sobey Art Award in 2023 and 2024. She continues to exhibit widely across Canada and internationally and is represented by Patel Brown Gallery in Toronto and Norberg Hall in Calgary. She maintains an active studio practice and gratefully resides in Treaty 7 Territory, in Mohkinstsis/Calgary.

Santos explores ideas of self-hood that embrace multiplicity, hybridity, and transformation through a reflection of movement, migration and change while considering the fragmented yet empowering relationships to heritage. Immigrating to Canada from the Philippines at a young age serves as a departure point for her considerations regarding identity, belongingness, discrimination and oppression, as well as the tether to a culture and ancestry graspable only through enactments of memory. The images in her work negotiate narratives of the past and present through a diasporic lens, and results in the creation of a personal myth; a visual vocabulary influenced by the Filipino and Western folktales of her early youth, sensorial connections via taste, smell and texture, Filipino traditions both commonplace and revered, and the geography and landscape both of her homeland and present environments real or imagined. Like the woven textures continuously present in her work, she will speak of the intersection between self-awareness and the celebration of plural identities, connection and community, labour, vulnerability, and care, which all come together to represent the lived experience as multifarious and influx and become necessary within a structure of resilience and repair.

How do the processes of making and thinking intersect, or become entangled, in the work of artists, critics, curators, and art historians? This provocative question anchors this new Speakers’ Series presented by the Department of Visual Arts and Art History of York University. The series brings together a dynamic roster of local and international voices to explore the rich terrain of contemporary art making, curatorial innovation, and critical art historical research. From studio to seminar, from exhibition to essay, this series invites us to consider how making and thinking about art are not separate acts, but deeply intertwined modes of understanding expression today.

This event is sponsored by the York University Graduate Programs of Art History and Visual Culture and the Visual Arts Department, and the Philippine Studies Group at the York Centre for Asian Research.

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Host or Publisher The Department of Visual Art & Art History, York University