ARTIST STATEMENT
Tiago Da Cruz
In my practice, I engage in experimental printing with enlargements made on gelatin silver paper as processes of translation. I approach printing by creating multiple iterations using inversions to cause a gradual softening visible throughout my work. I use gelatin silver prints as paper negatives to transform black and white photographs into color by solar and lunar exposures. Inversion appears in my work as a signal to abstraction. I include negative prints in my installations to disrupt the experience of looking at a photograph while referencing how images begin as negatives. Abstraction grows like an organism through my process of breaking down photographs, eschewing visual clarity, and considering an inversion as a finished work. In this way, queer abjectness becomes queer abstraction as pure possibility.
Starting with discarded materials informs my practice and my interest in sustainability. Using expired materials grounds my work by allowing for unexpected outcomes from seemingly unwanted materials to enter my process of making. I arrange test strips abstracted from my past works that accompany my recent printed gelatin silver photographs. These test strips signify a connecting link to my process directly binding separate images into one. Using found fogged paper, solarization, temperature alterations, solar and lunar exposures, over and under exposures, and test strips all support the framework of working with photographs experimentally from a queer perspective. I center my work around using light sensitive paper, for the ability it has to translate and preserve images and objects on paper. The process of image transformation through light exposure allows me to separate myself from a camera, while recording images that resemble drawings with light.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Tiago Da Cruz
Born and raised in Los Angeles, California, Tiago Da Cruz is a visual artist making work in and around the mediums of both Drawing and Photography. Tiago is working through the language of queer abstraction making enlargements on gelatin silver paper that undergo cycles of inversion. He is interested in altering images through methods of inverting, saturating, softening, and exposing gelatin silver paper with solar and lunar light.
He often uses expired and found materials, driving his interest in sustainability and refusing “new material,” essential for his processes of queering and breaking down photographs. In 2022, Tiago received their BFA in Photography from California College of the Arts. He has shown work in group shows at Root Division in San Francisco, and recently at LAMAG in Los Angeles. Tiago currently is based in Los Angeles, California where he lives and works.
Website: www.tiagodacruzstudio.com
