Tiago Da Cruz

.

Exhibitions Images and Recordings: View.

||||

Current Exhibition:

January 25 – March 1, 2025. Winter. Los Angeles (4478).

(paradise)

Sohyong Lee, Rudik Ovsepyan, Danica Ribi, santoni kina, Keywan Tafteh, Tiago Da Cruz

+ Reference: Checklist.

+ Release: File.

+ Press: This Week’s Must-See Art (Curate LA: February 20-26, 2025).

+ Exhibition Documentation : View.

|

Bio

Born and raised in Los Angeles, California, Tiago Da Cruz is a visual artist making work in and around the mediums of both Drawing and Photography. Tiago is working with making enlargements on gelatin silver paper that undergo iterative cycles of inversion. He is interested in working within the medium of photography through fading of images in the process of solar and lunar exposures on light sensitive paper.

He often uses expired and found materials, collapses time through prolonged exposures, records memory, and refuses use of “new material,” essential for his processes of queering and breaking down photographs. In 2022, Tiago received their BFA in Photography from California College of the Arts. He was selected as one of the exhibiting artists of the 2024 Forecast exhibition at SF Camerawork. Tiago currently is based in Los Angeles, California where he lives and works. 

_

Through my process of fading images, I reflect on the instability and temporality of traditional photographic image making. I am concerned with expiration; expired material collapses time into a sheet of photo paper. I expose expired light sensitive gelatin silver paper for prolonged periods of time to the light from the sun and moon over the course of hours, days, and weeks. By embracing the natural decay and transformation of images over time, my work invites viewers to reconsider the temporal nature of all things, including artistic expression. Integrating fragments from my images into books and onto gelatin silver photographs, I incorporate physical pieces like test strips from my darkroom process.

My practice  merges memory, abstraction, and time through distortions of analog photographic processes. My way of working with traditional processes is expressed in non-traditional notions of permanence in art-making by manipulating images through iterative exposures to natural light on expired materials. I question the stability of a photograph by tracking and exhibiting its transformation. I use my darkroom-printed photographs as paper negatives and positives, exposing them with a new sheet of expired light sensitive paper. This results in a monochromatic image softened by the dislocation of visual clarity. All of my photographic works are able to be used as paper negatives or positives and can be viewed as part of my process or included as finished works. As each iteration unfolds, traces of the original images dissolve into soft fading photographs, shifting to less recognizable forms.

{c.01/25/2025. Biographical text courtesy of the artist.}

|

[A Note on brush (2025) and releasing (2024). Included in (paradise) .]

Picture (of) a Picture.

Because I start by looking I’m tempted to forget everything except what I see, what I’ve seen.

But these lumen prints do more than make me see something—they are more than images, more than pictures. This time, they do the looking, the (star) gazing. (So I start to remember what looking’s like.) They trace paths, passages(, apertures) between nows and thens. They look-for ways of traveling time by following the length of a sun: one for 12-hours, one for 144-hours: material, time, distance, and speed…. Basking. All the ingredients for a place (under the stars). Moonlit, sunshined.

Now I’m Looking (again): and like the sun I can’t see it directly but I know exactly where it is and I know it’s there. (Remember: the sun is about distance and time travel, more than just seeing—that’s just an extra æffect.) Somehow in my ultraviolet haze I am seeing something familiar, but I honestly have no idea what it is—or at least I couldn’t tell you. Or at least something breaks-down between what I’m seeing, what I’m remembering, and what I’m (not) saying. There’s no copy of some “real,” no capture of some specific scene or scenery. With enough of a sunburnt gleam to scatter myself—my self-images—from view while I’m still looking, I can only come back to what I am seeing (and I don’t know what that it is exactly). I am stuck looking at seeing, or seeing my looking. A sleepy, nodding, waking feeling of watching the morning warm a nearby window sill. My encounter with the works becomes a cycle—an activity and a movement—through repeated inversions and negations of something familiar and something unknowable, irretrievable (but continually present). 

Like the stars, it’s somewhere light goes when it leaves some body behind. 

I only find my place (right here) with light from somewhere else. Lit-up by my disappearance like a plane in flames.

—80

____

Exhibitions with the Gallery: