Ontopo and Ryan Lee Gallery present “Hablas Turista”, a series of work organized by Jon Santos for the Ryan Lee gallery window (RL WINDOW). The works on view deal with placemaking, art production on tour and reconciling identity in foreign lands.

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Ontopo is an on-going series of performative and participatory projects organized by Jon Santos, based on collective creative exchange. With a multi-faceted embrace of visual, culinary, design, sound, architectural and performance, Ontopo reimagines the relationship between creating and consuming, author and audience in the age of accelerated production. 

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At the project’s core is the gathering of participants in dynamic regional locations that range from lush rainforests to Buddhist monasteries. Each unique environment holds the promise of catalyzing a freedom from familiar constraints and self consciousness, allowing for more present participation.

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The show’s title “Hablas Turista?” translates via Google Translate as “Do You Speak Tourist” which is a reference to some of the work in the group that were created on site in Tulum, Mexico by visiting artists of American citizenship. 

A group of people on an Ontopo retreat is in many ways, spontaneously assembled for recreational purposes, analysis, retreat, production and performance. In this context, the work moves beyond traditional notions of place, genre and artistic practice informed by the surroundings and or a temporary community. The binary of localism and tourism subjugate the artist to consider their voice within the context of community and consider modes of production outside their studio.

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This exhibition presents work created by former participants of Ontopo which by context also makes them contributors to the project. They have either gone on retreat and engaged their surroundings or produced a site-specific work for this show: Amy Yao, Priscilla Jeong, Kamau Patton, and Juri Onuki.

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Amy Yao’s contribution is a photographic image of a mixed-media installation created in Tulum in 2018, comprised of freshly cooked bacon placed in the sand and on top of found objects and detritus on the property where the retreat was being held. 

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Kamau Patton offers a vantage point of the natural features surrounding the area  in upstate New York where ontopo took place in a Buddhist monastery. He refers to this as a logic marked as informal and eliminated through displacement and enclosure into parametrically ordered spaces.

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Juri Onuki engages the work of George Miyasaki which will be on view during her performance. Her approach posits zen philosophy as a stabilizing mechanism for Japanese Americans after World War II. In this endeavor, the artist will question Japanese American identity by performing everyday gestures and movements based on Miyasaki’s work installed in the gallery.

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Priscilla Jeong focuses on the entanglement of digital sociology, labor, gender and technology and contemporary spiritualism with emphasis on the role of humanic and machinic bodies. 

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