ASPIRATION
by Diogo Montes
Opening: May 18 | 6pm – 9pm
By appointment: May 19 – 31
Closing: Jun 3 | 6pm – 9pm
16 Waverly Avenue, #204 – Brooklyn, NY
Aspiration is a contemplative site-specific installation by Diogo Montes. It invites the audience to reflect on the inequality of the capitalist system and the fundamentals of the American Dream.
Through the projection of a poetic sunlight coming through the window, the installation aims to make people stop at an empty room and breathe for a minute. It encourages people to slow down, leave the rushed New York life outside, and deliberate on their lives’ goals.
Is a mad rush for wealth accumulation life’s ultimate goal? Is it worth spending your life chasing it? Aspiration challenges us to consider the values and objectives we uphold as individuals and as a society.
As an artist, I am interested in the complexities of people’s personalities, in what constitutes their identities, mostly from a cultural standpoint. I was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 1979, and I moved to New York in 2010. In my multidisciplinary practice, I investigate the transformational effect that cultural dislocations can cause in individual identities. This exploration is profoundly influenced by my personal experience as an immigrant. Elements like repetition, cadence, and control, are obsessively recurrent in my art. Order and chaos, opposites at first, beautifully coexist under a tense harmony, almost unanimously, in my body of work.
Diogo Montes
Visual Artist
b. Rio de Janeiro, BR lives and works in Brooklyn, NY, U.S.
By harmonizing order and chaos, his work explores the transformational effect of cultural change, and exchange. The complexities of one’s identity, through the lenses of cultural perceptions, are expressed both as a theme and as a practice, by using diverse mediums like collage, painting, coffee art, photography, and on-site installation.
As art director and designer, Diogo worked for communications companies and cultural institutions. His work was exhibited in Brazil, Mexico and China, and was recognized by various industry awards and publications.
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