Isaac Vazquez (b. Cleveland, Ohio, the unceded territory of the Erie, Kaskaskia, Mississauga nations) has black curly hair, brown skin, and a pair of eyes that question what has been declared as true. Born into a working class Puerto Rican and El Salvadorian family, he is an interdisciplinary artist who seeks how we discern the past through form. Working within installation, sculpture, or within the picture plane itself his practice revolves around methods of image-making: histories molded from images and images that are cast out of histories; languages embedded within those processes and the very edges of their perception. Isaac received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and his MFA from Northwestern University. In 2020 he received a University Fellowship and in 2023 the Paschke Grant from Northwestern University. Isaac has been a finalist for the NYU Latinx Projects, the Luminarts Fellowship, and the Monira Foundation Residency. He has curated and exhibited in Chicago, in venues such as The Yards Gallery, Sullivan Galleries, The Block Museum of Art, and The Terrain Biennial. He is teaching at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago currently, and has upcoming exhibitions in Oaxaca at La Clinica and in New York City at Cooper Union.
José De Sancristóbal (born; lives and works) is an artist working with photography, video, film, and writing. Currently, he’s trying to compile the images and texts—such as this one—that will convince the United States of America that he is an “individual of extraordinary ability in the arts;” his work is also concerned with such processes. He is interested in the bureaucratization of identity and, more importantly, the actions that challenge it. By considering the supposed objectivity of identification techniques through the lens of unmeasurable practices—like fiction, role play, memory, translation, and magical realism—he’s looking to poke holes in those devices purporting to administer the self, such as passport photographs, migration regulations, citizenship forms, or national borders. As an individual of extraordinary ability, José has received significant recognition for achievements from organizations, critics, government agencies, and other recognized experts in the field (and is not affiliated with the interests of Communism). He earned an MFA from Northwestern University, and a BFA from Universidad de Monterrey. He was a 2023-24 Studio Fellow at the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program. He is a 2024 Luminarts Foundation Visual Arts Fellow, and is an upcoming 2024-25 Fine Arts Work Center Fellow, in Provincetown, MA.
These images complete and further expand the reach of both of our artistic projects.
Some of Isaac’s photographs were meant to serve as documentation for some of the films he was working on from 2020 to 2022. As he was filming he would carry a mirror to capture certain angles and scenes which neither his tripod nor camera would permit him to. This led to a number of images that were initially intended to function as documentation but soon became a project in and of themselves. The mirror began to distort the picture plane. This became a point of interest as he was searching for or trying to replicate certain landscape images he had found within archives for one of the films he was working on: If you look closely you can see a fox moving in the distance.
If You Look Closely You Can See a Fox Moving in the Distance, is a culmination of the four years he spent digging through various archives searching for his family of immigrants: his mother’s family; specifically, trying to find images of their migration from El Salvador to the United States.
The distorted picture plane became a figurative and metaphorical symbol for his encounter within archives. This had led to some diptychs; the mirror-image and its image mirrored. Over time he began to pull the language he enjoyed from using the mirror to another photographic project.
José’s images stem from a trilogy of film works that critique and consider identification images. The digitized film images document different locations and people in and around Tapachula, Mexico as part of his project Notes on the translation of El Solitario (or Preface to the English Edition). This town, bordering Guatemala, serves as the geographic point of departure for a series of considerations around migration, translation, and the fluidity of borders. A prominent number of these images were produced at the Suchiate River, which divides Mexico and Guatemala, and that is constantly crossed using inner tubes, or “cámaras” in Spanish.
Additionally, the stills come from two different film projects: Given the right conditions any sound can pass through a wall and Companion. The first is a two-channel video installation shot between Chicago and Ciudad Juárez. In it, the relationship between the production of a film and the film itself blur their boundaries as a way to explore the porous relationship between the two sites depicted and the people that have crossed them.
Companion is an in-progress short-film that explores a single concept and its various implications: recognition. Formally, it combines the tropes of classic, talking-head documentary (presenting its characters as people addressing the camera directly), and religious painting (specifically a scene by Caravaggio) in order to consider three registers of “recognition.” In the end, the work attempts to sidestep the hegemony of the visual (and specifically the camera) in the practices of recognition, proposing instead a reorganization of social relations.
At large, these works seek to combine formal rigor with allegorical figures, drawing equally upon realism and fantasy in order to consider the relationship between structure and content in image-making processes — specifically when those images perform within the organization of nation-states and citizenship.