Artist Talk with Place, Color y Sand artists Carlos Rosales-Silva and Eric Santoscoy-Mckillip

Throughout the Southwest U.S. and Borderland, sand is a protectant when mixed with mortar and applied to the exterior of adobe or cinder block. Sometimes it is painted over in pinks, oranges, purples, and blues. Sometimes a hand-painted logo that is recognizable but not exact is painted over this sand-coated surface. Sand is an irritant and abrasive to the skin when hurled by the wind. When sand is mixed with the force of wind, it makes hard edges soft. Sand is an aggregate of rock, minerals, and material, a sum of parts. At times, sand is the color of our skin. It creates an unmistakable sound when it is scraped from a wheelbarrow and used as glue for a rock wall being built.

Carlos Rosales-Silva and Eric Santoscoy-Mckillip trace and confront their personal histories and identities within the Latinx, Mexican-American, and Chicanx Cultures in their practices, naturally leading to points of intersection in their work. The use of place, color, and sand is found in both of their work. Sand is used as a signifier for the wall, the street, and something applied by hand that also comes from the land. Having both grown up in the southwest and on the border, color is ingrained in both artists’ minds and pulled from daily sunsets, neon green paletas, and plastic flowers bought downtown.

Place, Color y Sand is a selection of paintings and wall sculptures by Carlos Rosales-Silva and Eric Santoscoy-Mckillip. It is a conversation of the formal and conceptual intersections between the artists and how their approaches have led to each develop specific visual languages that meet and cross paths in their practice and work. Along with showing discreet objects, the artists will collaborate on a mural in Grace R. Cavnar Gallery.

Carlos Rosales-Silva was born in El Paso, Texas and has lived throughout Texas. Carlos received his BFA from the University of Texas at Austin. He considers oral histories from Mexican and Indigenous peoples, post-colonial historical texts, and spaces that are safe and inclusive for people of color the foundation and central cosmology of his work. Carlos has exhibited throughout Texas, and in Los Angeles, Miami, Minneapolis, Chicago, Kansas City, and New York City and was most recently an artist in residence at Artpace in San Antonio, Texas and at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, NY. Carlos is currently pursuing an MFA at the School of Visual Arts in New York, NY.

Eric Santoscoy-Mckillip was born in El Paso, Texas in 1989. He received his BFA from the University of Texas at Austin in 2011, a Master of Interdisciplinary Studies from the University of Texas at El Paso in 2015 and an MFA from the New York University in 2017. Moving between painting and sculpture, Eric’s work is an examination of place, identity, and memory through the use of color, symbols, and textures by reclaiming what has already been reclaimed. The transitions between these elements shift, overlap and blur to reflect the in-between space of the borderland, continually changing histories and identities of the geographic region and himself.