KATES-FERRI PROJECTS is delighted to announce Eric Manuel Santoscoy-Mckillip’s second solo exhibition, titled AMOR ETERNO: A Memories Lifecycle, at the 561 Grand Street space, taking place between May 9 and June 9, 2024, with an opening reception on Thursday, May 9th from 6-8pm. Amor Eterno: A Memories Lifeycle means eternal love and the title borrows from the famed 1984 song by the beloved Mexican singer-songwriter and actor, Juan Gabriel (1950-2016). Continuing to explore the US-Mexico border identities within his first show at Kates-Ferri, the new series of stucco, metal, and collage works in this exhibition conceptually imbues works with memory and a connection to place.

As ever, enlivened by its material presence, the stuccoed pieces are between painting and sculpture. These new works fall into five loose groupings. The most closely aligned works to his past works are the geometric pieces, like Camino

Real (2024), alluding to facades and windows at the border. The metal sculptures provide viewers with a grounded vantage point to experience the collection. The organic pieces, like Lapida Sepulcral (Head Stone) (2024), are one step into nature, illustrating the silhouettes of rock formations throughout the desert southwest and referencing the rock walls also found in the region. Each shape is tied to a site that the artist has visited. The memories of these rock formations and walls are now alive in the works. The stripped paintings, like Atmospheric Refraction Kisses (2024), look further into the vibrant horizon, especially moments of the sunrise and sunset. They perfectly capture the eternal recurrence of the sun’s movement and how the scene itself will never recur the same way again. The duality of the scene echoes the exhibition title’s mournful ending to eternal love that only persists in memory. Last, but not least, the star-shaped paintings, like Estrella: Sunrise (2024), take their form from the NASA space telescope’s stitched images before they are colorized and cropped. Stars are similarly eternal to the human eye. However, we are perceiving the past when we look at a star light years away–we are looking at a memory. Santoscoy-Mckillip expertly expands from architectural features between the two countries to the expanse of El Paso’s natural landscapes, and beyond.

The expansion of Santoscoy-Mckillip’s work goes from the quotidian to the cosmos, with each layer examined separately. In his collages, he collapses these planes of existence into one pictorial space, as seen in Stations (Ghosts) (2024). He repurposes images from Desert, a magazine featuring landscapes from the 1930s-1980s, as the background of his collages. While admiring the imagery, Santoscoy-Mckillip acknowledges the problematic narratives embedded in the magazine's articles. By stripping the image of color, the artist finds a way to utilize the landscape without glorifying the ideas of the magazine. On each collage, the artist adds colorful shapes and designs with a black-ink-on-white-paper drawing of NASA images. Firmly rooting his series in the two-dimensional space, Santoscoy-Mckillip anchors time and space to the present, pulling forth the uncountable memories to the forefront.

In AMOR ETERNO, Santoscoy-Mckillip returns to Kates-Ferri Projects with a new exploration of memory, place, and identity. His stucco, metal, and collage works embody memory and connections to the landscape and its people, inviting viewers to contemplate the transient nature of human existence and the fickleness of our memories. Through his collages, the artist collapses planes of existence, playing with the duality of expansiveness and containment in one plane while also navigating complex historical narratives with sensitivity and depth. In this captivating exhibition, Santoscoy-Mckillip skillfully intertwines the personal and the universal, offering a poignant reflection on the enduring power of memory and the intricate ties that bind us to our surroundings and to each other.

Bio: Eric Santoscoy-Mckillip is an artist living and working in Brooklyn, NY. He was born in 1989 and raised in the U.S./Mexico borderland city of El Paso, Texas. Eric earned a BFA from the University of Texas at Austin, in 2011, a Masters in Interdisciplinary Studies from the University of Texas at El Paso in 2015 focusing on art education and border studies, and a MFA in Fine Art from the New York University in 2017. He has shown in Texas, New Mexico and New York.

Artist Statement: Moving between painting and sculpture, my work is an examination of place and identity through the use of color, symbols, space, and textures by reclaiming what has already been reclaimed. The transitions between these elements shift, overlap and blur to reflect the physical and metal in-between space of the US-Mexico borderland, the continually changing complex identities and histories of myself and of the geographic region. My practice is a tool to reassess the narratives I was told to be true or that I have pieced together myself and those that have been passed on by oral, familial and communal histories. I use it to connect to people and places I no longer can and reflect on imagery through the time I spent with it. Building a lexicon through different techniques, like making and using stucco as both a texture and protectant or applying layers of paint to abstract the underlying form, I am paying respect to the lineage of the painting (i.e. sand painting, sign painting, car painting, murals, landscape) in the southwest and US/Mexico border culture while using a both minimal/maximal language to isolate, bring specificity and focus on this place that is fleeting, shifting and changing.

Art Works on View  

Video of exhibition on YouTube