ASPIRATION
by Diogo Montes
May 2023
16 Waverly Avenue, #204 – Brooklyn, NY
Through a poetic sunset light coming from the window, I intend to make people contemplate and reflect on the inequality of the capitalist system and the fundamentals of the American Dream.
Why is material accumulation still society’s goal? Is constituting a family and acquiring a high-class house in the suburbs still the image of success?
The installation is composed by a basic window structure and a sunlight projected on the wall and/or floor of a completely empty room.
The window is simple in its construction. It’s old and rusty, representing the majority of the American population with low incomes.
The sunlight projected on the wall reveals a much nicer window, fancy enough to represent a classic and expensive American house.
The piece invites the audience to contemplate and reflect on the American Dream imposed by society and think about what true life values and objectives could be.
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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