ARTIST STATEMENT
My work takes small discarded objects, sounds, and movements that seem silent and insignificant, and reemphasizes them to show both the strength and trauma in marginality. A key aspect I explore is the relationship between “authenticity” and race. In the series The Only 8 Things You Need, viewers are presented with eight words for Latin Americans foods that while still technically written in Spanish, have been acculturated into white American food culture. They are familiar to the the viewer as a consumer, even as most viewers might have no connection to Spanish as a language. In this way, these eight words are permitted and celebrated in a way that immigrant bodies or Spanish-speaking bodies are not in the US. Both the sound wave and the pronunciation guide work as teaching tools for language “correctness” for a word that is a cultural item. This is further emphasized by the hand-rubbed quality of each print – another aspect of this language game that conflates the repeated feeling and rubbing of this dimensional sound wave on paper with attempting to learn, to feel out the “correct” way this word can be understood and pronounced. Yet these words, despite being paired with a pronunciation guide, and the aural data of a sound wave, seem more obfuscated than ever. It is stark, removed from from the color and “otherness” that a cultural context or brown body might give. Bleached and ghost-like, where lies the authenticity in such a fraught cultural item? What does it mean to give a word “correct” pronunciation and how is this understood within racist histories of language, accents, and the taking of goods and labor?
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Savannah Bustillo is a Colombian-American queer printmaker, bookmaker, and papermaker from Albuquerque, New Mexico. She received a BFA from Washington University in St. Louis, with a concentration in printmaking and a second major in anthropology. Her work has been shown at the Hispanic Cultural Center in Albuquerque, the Contemporary Art Museum in St. Louis, Washington University in St. Louis, Syracuse University, the Morgan Conservatory, the Bradbury Museum in Arkansas, Anderson Ranch Arts Center, the University of North Florida, Women’s Studio Workshop, and most recently at Highpoint Center for Printmaking in Minneapolis, where she is currently a 2021-2022 Jerome Early Career Printmaker Resident.
© Savannah Bustillo