Santiago Cal: Rooted in the in-between

Drawings of teeth are stacked on a desk in Santiago Cal’s Richards Hall studio. A hunk of wood is clamped inside a vise. A spiraling coil of copper tubing and copper buoyancy balls sit on the floor. Walk through a door, and small wooden figures populate the room, a piece of cloth rests on a table, and saws, chisels and other woodworking tools are in place.

School’s out for the summer, and Cal is activating his studio, turning his attention from his sculpture and drawing students to his work.

“A big chunk of my life is being a teacher, right?” said Cal, a professor of sculpture in the School of Art, Art History & Design. “Some people can balance the studio teaching thing. For me that's very hard. When I try to balance that out, and, early on I was, I was trying to do that and my studio always won.

“So now what I do is, when I'm teaching, I'm just in teaching mode 100 percent. I give my students everything, then whenever I have a break, I can really just fall into my practice 100 percent. So, what I do during the school year, I just read, I take notes, I look at things, I draw, you know, I kind of amass, and then when I have the time to just like expand, I expand.”

That expansion, so to speak, takes place in Cal’s studios, at school and at home, where, as the Richards studio contents demonstrate, he works his way around multiple media — he’s just started to work with cloth — and ideas that largely involve figural representation.

“The way I wander or navigate, at least at this current time, I feel like Travis from the opening scene of [the film] ‘Paris, Texas,’ where he's just walking, he doesn't know where he's off to or where he's from, and you don't know where he's off to and why he's doing this thing,” Cal said. “Yet there's like anticipation, discovery and acceptance, all happening on multiple levels, and at once, too.”

A constant churn of ideas and media is something that Cal has taken from working with his classes in drawing and sculpture.

“Okay, I want students to run in every direction,” he said. “So, when I'm teaching the group, I’m like doing mold making one minute, plaster another minute, sewing another minute, modeling another minute, casting in the foundry another minute. I’ve had students do dance performances with sculpture, just like happenings, I love that. I think that idea of just like going in 20 directions at once shows that my studio practice and my teaching style is in sync.”

Cal, who was born in Belize, is almost certainly one of the Nebraska-based artists who has exhibited the most internationally, with exhibitions in, among other cities, Barcelona, Taipei, Havana, Auckland, and artist-in- residence positions at Mexico’s Gruber-Jez Foundation and, fittingly, at the Posting 
Land Art Park.

That park is in Belize, the country he represents internationally, even though he moved to Pennsylvania when he was 13. He went to Kutztown University of Pennsylvania for his undergraduate work and received an M.F.A. from Virginia Commonwealth University in 1998. He taught art at a Pennsylvania residential treatment center for boys before joining the UNL faculty in 2000.

“When I first moved here and my career was starting, I did a lot of international work,” Cal said. “It was hard — physically it was hard, financially it was just hard in lots of ways. But what that did was really it set up a foundation for me to build from. Now I don't show as much internationally, right? I still do, and when I do, I would say that it's very important that I represent Belize.

“Belize is a little bit of like a stranger within Latin America. It’s connected to Mexico, it's connected to Guatemala, it's just on the other side of Honduras. But because it was a British colony, it gets lumped in the Caribbean. But when the Caribbean is being discussed, Belize is part of Central America.”

Cal’s earliest work to be widely seen in Nebraska was a memorable Sheldon Museum of Art exhibition by a Lincoln artist in at least a quarter-century.

2005’s “Tierra, Tierra” ran a chain link fence through the Sheldon auditorium, from the stage to back wall, then “continued” across the small gallery next to the auditorium.

On one side of the fence in the gallery was a red ball. On the other, two dogs had blue/green spheres stacked on top of their heads that reached to the ceiling. Perched atop the fence was a little brown girl, clinging to a post, leaning toward the side that contained the ball.

Twenty years later, “Tierra, Tierra” can now be read as an early work in the direction Cal has been pursuing of late.

“I’ve done work that's based sort of like a cultural critique but right now, what's exciting me is an idea of the cultural theorist Stuart Hall, who's originally from Jamaica and moved in the 1960s to England, and became one of the founders of cultural studies,” he said.

“The way he describes it is very familiar to me because of this idea of not only moving from one place to another, but what's being asked of you when you arrive, and then what you understand of what you left behind, and that reflection on both where you're from and where you've arrived absolutely makes you a stranger in both systems.”

That sense of uncertainty and ambiguity that Cal tries to convey in his work is tied in with his teaching, as well, as he links the international displacement of immigrants with cultural and geographic displacement of students.

“It's a part of us, this whole notion of identity,” Cal said. “I always say this to my students, because I have a lot of students that are struggling with the same thing. If you feel very alone, if you feel very misunderstood, we really are the most populous group, this group of in-betweeners, these migrants from one place to another. We are everywhere. One might be from different continents, whatever, but we understand things in a way that people who have been in that place for generations will not understand on both sides of what you left and where you are now.”

The sense of ambiguity and uncertainty is conveyed via the figures in Cal’s work, be it a man dramatically turning his face away from the viewer, hands clutching his chest, or a tiny featureless man on a platform, or even the sounds that filled the gallery at a recent show.

“I don't find that my work is critical,” Cal said. “I'm more interested in making something that embodies something that's elusive, something that's overseen, something that's present, but not tangible. I feel, as lots of immigrants do, that there are those experiences that I've had, and I think a lot of other people have had, and I'm not doing it in a critical way. I’m just saying this is what occurs, right?”

While far from realistic, Cal’s sculptures are empathetic, creating a sense of shared experiences and feeling with the viewer who identifies with the emotion rather than a precisely rendered shape.

“I hope they’re expressive without being gesturally expressive,” Cal said. “One of the reasons I do that is to explore the human condition and to try to create a connection between any audience member and the work itself. My goal isn’t realism. My goal is sort of [conveying] emotional, mental and physical states.”

That, and his exploration of material, could be seen in “Roots & Shoots,” his Lux Center for the Arts exhibition with frequent collaborator Joshua Lux, who provided a stand of potted plants that ran down the center of the gallery.

Around the gallery — on the walls and, hauntingly, on a bench — were Cal’s carved wooden figures, titled by the color of their background, that were rooted in emotion rather than precise depiction and 8-foot sound-emitting steel ductwork tubes.

That was the sort of exhibition that Cal will have in the future, showing the work he wants to continue to make without worrying all that much about art world success, nationally or internationally.

“I have aspirations of things I'd like to accomplish in a studio, but I wouldn’t say — like, as a young artist, I would think like many, I just wanted to be showing New York all the time, or showing at a particular museum, and feeling like that would 
be the goal,” Cal said.

“I actually think very differently about art and art making now, and the rewards of it. I think if I were to have any goal at this particular point, it's just to keep making as long as I can. It’s such an important part of my life, what I do, and how I understand this world. If it gets recognized or not, that's okay with me.”

—L. Kent Wolgamott is a freelance writer and former art and entertainment reporter for the Lincoln Journal-Star.