Open Studio Artist in Residence | Francisco González-Rosas

January 10 – February 3

Struts welcomes new Open Studio Artist in Residence Francisco González-Rosas (he/they). Francisco is a performance and new media artist born in Chile, and currently based in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal. Their creative research practice revolves around the constant mediation of reality in contemporary life, using performance as a generative device to approach the studio work. González-Rosas holds an MFA in Intermedia from Concordia University (Montréal, Canada), and a BA in Acting from Finis Terrae University (Santiago, Chile). Solo exhibitions include “Techniques of the Narcissist” (Elektra Gallery, 2019, Montreal) and “the museum of the copy/pasted identities” (McLuhan Centre for Culture and Technology, 2022, Toronto).

Francisco’s current work can be understood as a form of hyper-mediation: a conceptual exploration in which by-products of the body —scanning, CGI avatars, performance scenes— are arranged and projected into multiple pieces. This process is substantially determined by the technology with which the work is produced. The relationship with the camera in the case of the video performance, the photo-based CGI generation, and the upload to the software through scanning, render the body as an ever-expanding entity through formats and textures, either naturalistic or glitched. The gesture of self-mediation emerges in connection to questions of queerness, identity, capital and spectacle, as invisible technologies that intervene and alter the creation of the contemporary body.

Throughout their residency they will focus on the digital production and post production of this work, which will be exhibited as a multichannel video installation in Montreal. They will edit sound and image for the different channels of the video performance and will also create new 3D animation pieces using the open source 3D software Blender.