319 AIR – Exhibition Series / Fall 2021
Dramatis Personae: Maisie O’Brien and Gene Anthony Santiago-Holt (aka Moyogash)
October 1 – 31
Opening Reception: First Friday, October 1, 6–9PM
Gene Anthony Santiago-Holt, Still from JACK-O-MOYO: Scarecrow A Go-Go Has No Da-Home-Home, various dimensions, 2021 (left)
Maisie O’Brien, Still from the shadow sequence for True Nature’s Child, illuminated cut paper and found objects, 2021 (right)
Grizzly Grizzly is pleased to announce our second artist-in-residence exhibit this season. Dramatis Personae features the work of Philadelphia-based artists Maisie O’Brien and Gene Anthony Santiago-Holt, who also performs under the name Moyogash. Latin for “persons of a drama,” the term dramatis personae designates the characters of a drama or a play, as well as the list of names found in a playbill or a score identifying performers and their roles. Theatre features prominently in O’Brien’s and Santiago-Holt’s work: O’Brien develops shadow animations using an overhead projector and handmade objects that are set to original music; Santiago-Holt’s multi-media installations are staged as altars that are further activated through sound and noise. For both O’Brien and Santiago-Holt, theatre offers a way to embody and explore multiple identities—the different “persons” that shape the drama of lived experiences.
Interested in shadow and puppet theatre’s capacity to express personal mythology, O’Brien transforms everyday materials, such as torn sheets of paper, into characters and settings that are animated through performance. O’Brien is particularly drawn to the often-spiritual tradition of shadow puppetry and its capacity to stage the physical and psychological process of transformation. Self-described as a Chinese-American adoptee, O’Brien creates work that connects her to the longstanding tradition of Chinese puppet theatre and the Daoist practice of “ghost calling,” in which the manipulation of shadows becomes the conduit between worlds. Focusing on moments of vulnerability, O’Brien crafts stories in which characters navigate such themes as belonging, injustice, and liberation. Just as shadows are a conduit between worlds in Daoism, O’Brien’s storytelling becomes a conduit between the real and the imaginary.
Whereas O’Brien explores the nuances of shadows, Santiago-Holt uses audio and visual noise to explore, reconcile, and sometimes exorcise personal mythology and hybrid identities. Drawing on his Puerto Rican and Irish background, Santiago-Holt builds a multi-media altar that includes poppet dolls, or the Celtic equivalent of voodoo dolls, alongside references to Santeria and cartomancy. As 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. Santiago-Holt’s looping animations and droning audio express the discomfort and friction of hybridity, as well as sound an alarm at the creep of gentrification and its erasure of culture.
About 319 AIR: From January until August 2021, the five artist-run galleries on the 319 Building’s 2nd floor hosted artist residencies in their spaces. The pandemic had made it difficult to safely present exhibitions in our spaces, and at the same time, many artists were displaced from their studios due tothe pandemic’s economic effects. Now that the galleries are reactivated, the artists are exhibiting works from their residencies in groups and pairs throughout fall 2021.
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 Bios
Maisie O’Brien is a Philadelphia transplant from Dallas, and a Chinese-American adoptee. Growing out of their visual arts background in printmaking, their work desires storytelling at the crossroads of shadow puppetry, original cello music, paper cut outs, and stop motion animation. Digging deeper into shadow theater's capacity to translate experience and personal mythology, they have since had the pleasure of performing at (virtual) puppet
slams since 2020 and pursuing further studies in puppetry with Bread & Puppet Theater, the University of Connecticut, the Chicago International Puppet Festival, and the O’Neill Puppetry Conference. Maisie is also an arts educator in Philadelphia, working to help uplift the importance of art in the community through Spiral Q, Asian Arts Initiative, Fleisher Art Memorial, and STEAM. They look forward to their time at Grizzly Grizzly as a gestational space for increasing the scale of ongoing international collaborations and miscellaneous improvisations.
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.