Photograph by Ian O’Hara
Bio
Walter San Martín (b. 2005, Long Island, NY) is an artist based in Miami, FL, and New York, NY, where he is currently pursuing a BFA at The Cooper Union. His interdisciplinary practice spans sculpture, performance, and printmaking, often exploring themes of migration, labor, and masculinity. San Martín’s work has been shown in group exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, NY; Laney Contemporary in Savannah, GA; the Bass Museum in Miami, FL; and the YoungArts Gallery in Miami, FL. He has received national recognition, including the YoungArts Award with Distinction and the Scholastic Art & Writing Gold Medal Portfolio Award.
provisional artist statement (to be renewed)
Influenced by my migrant background and the blue-collar work that shaped my upbringing, my concepts contextualize the people, places, and patterns that surround me. In my process, I saturate myself with various imagery, music, and materials, fixating on their sociopolitical overlaps. I view my practice as a grapple with apophenia, attempting to string disperate context into tangible forms.
I compose my work as deliberate layers of context, bound by overarching themes: Migration, religion, psychology, and domination, focusing on the remnants that permeate my everyday life— social discrepancies, masculinity, and labor.
My work typically diverges into a performance-esque sculpture, where pieces can live as a records of their processeses as well as a standalone sculptures.
I’m infatuated with honest mediums, honest forms of communication that aren’t embellished or decadent, but effective and unrestricted by conventionality. Most of my artistic approaches focus on establishing relationships between materials and symbols, creating a conversation within media. In some of my performative processes, like in “Entre Ceuta Y Gibraltar”, I underscore a true ephemerality by having the piece installed into a roof and painted over. Not one of “self-destruction” but of an honest disregard.
My work exists to project social patterns I observe and experience. Art, to me, is an outcome of study with the intent to dismantle facades.
I compose my work as deliberate layers of context, bound by overarching themes: Migration, religion, psychology, and domination, focusing on the remnants that permeate my everyday life— social discrepancies, masculinity, and labor.
My work typically diverges into a performance-esque sculpture, where pieces can live as a records of their processeses as well as a standalone sculptures.
I’m infatuated with honest mediums, honest forms of communication that aren’t embellished or decadent, but effective and unrestricted by conventionality. Most of my artistic approaches focus on establishing relationships between materials and symbols, creating a conversation within media. In some of my performative processes, like in “Entre Ceuta Y Gibraltar”, I underscore a true ephemerality by having the piece installed into a roof and painted over. Not one of “self-destruction” but of an honest disregard.
My work exists to project social patterns I observe and experience. Art, to me, is an outcome of study with the intent to dismantle facades.