319 AIR – Grizzly Grizzly Artist-in-Residence / May 1 – May 30, 2021
Gene Anthony Santiago-Holt (aka Moyogash)
Grizzly Grizzly is excited to announce our fourth 319 AIR resident, Philadelphia-based artist Gene Anthony Santiago-Holt, also known as Moyogash, which is the pseudonym Santiago-Holt uses when he stages live noise performances. During his month-long residency, he will use the gallery as a studio to live-stream performances and experiment with sound and video projections that explore the intersections of the Puerto Rican and Irish cultures, which constitute his background.
For the past year Santiago-Holt has been working on a series of videos and objects that confront childhood taboos in order to examine behavior that is considered culturally repulsive. Often purposefully teetering on bad taste, his eye-popping (“the brighter, the better”) videos feature looping animations and droning audio. For Santiago-Holt, the nervous energy of the videos embody the “feelings of anxiety” he associates with his hybrid heritage.
Identifying as both multiracial and a native Philadelphian, Santiago-Holt is sensitive to gentrification, and his recent work responds to its impact on close-knit Irish and Puerto Rican communities in North Philadelphia. Bringing his handmade and eBay-purchased props and costumes to Grizzly Grizzly, Santiago-Holt will use the space to consider how to resist and cast away the inevitable loss of community and culture that accompanies gentrification.
About 319 AIR: Since January 2021, the five artist-run galleries on the 319 Building’s 2nd floor are hosting artist residencies in their spaces. The pandemic has made it difficult to safely present exhibitions in our spaces, and at the same time, many artists have been displaced from their studios due to the pandemic’s economic effects. In a time of isolation, we hope that making these spaces available offers inspiration and opportunity to realize new work, ideas, and (virtual) connections.
2020/21 Grizzly Grizzly programming and residencies are supported by Added Velocity which is administered by Temple Contemporary at Tyler School of Art and Architecture, Temple University and funded by the William Penn Foundation.
Artist Bio
Gene Anthony Santiago-Holt (aka MOYOGASH) is a multimedia artist residing in Philadelphia. He creates drawings, prints, and papier-mâché masks that function as singular objects, props, and as alter-ego disguises for his improvised video performances. Using filters, distortions, and an inventive digital ingestion process to break down and pixilate the image, his glitchy and heavily processed videos and GIFs incorporate original audio and found imagery including childhood photographs, pop-culture references, gaudy holiday decorations, and religious iconography to reconcile his mixed heritage, troubled familial relationships, and the “disconnection within myself.”
He has exhibited internationally at PiranesiLAB in Moscow, Russia; American University in Washington, DC; The Glitter Box Theater in Pittsburgh, PA, the Delaware Contemporary in Wilmington, DE and various other venues in the United States. Santiago-Holt graduated from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 2015 with a Bachelors of Fine Arts in sculpture and a concentration in printmaking. He is currently an MFA candidate in the Department of Art and Design at the University of Delaware, where he also teaches undergraduate printmaking and design classes.
Stills from: Saint Judas Iscariot with Candy Bunny listening to Doom Metal while the Holy Spirit Pigeon/ Dove? Watches from Above (Screentest), TRT: 10:00, 2021 (left) and JACK-O-MOYO - WHAT WRONG WIT TV PT.1, TRT: 7:42, 2021 (right)