Santo

The collection Santo is not about religion.

Religion, in this context, is but a tool. A tool used to “introduce” another culture. A tool that continues to strongly bind us to our colonial past.

Painted on our church ceilings are huge images of saints. Saints that do not look like us. Though transcendent in physical form, we continue to paint them in the likeness of those with pointed noses.

Santo, therefore, is a reaction to this practice. It tries to be a tool used to unlearn so we may relearn or rediscover ourselves amidst a world where culture is currency. To reconstruct, after all, means to first deconstruct.

With the distorted faces of the saints, do we consciously recreate them in our image or do we succumb to the familiar?