Dante Migone-Ojeda
Dante in his Brooklyn studio.
Dante Migone-Ojeda is a Brooklyn-based Latinx artist who received his BFA from Washington University and has attended a residency at Arquetopia in Puebla, Mexico. He completed his MFA at Columbia University in 2019, and has exhibited in shows internationally. In his own words, Migone-Ojeda’s work focuses on “materializing radical threshold spaces and the tension of navigating them.” He does this through an amalgamation of both material and practice by working through different aspects of sculpture, installation, printmaking, and poetry to combine various materials: such as chains, wood, text, images, and other found objects.
He has been exhibited in the Public Sculpture Series in University City, Missouri, as well as a solo popup at GoodMother Gallery in Oakland, California. He previously received the LeRoy Neiman Fellowship, and curated the show 42/18 at the LeRoy Neiman Gallery. He has also previously completed the summer program at SOMA in Mexico City in 2019.
Can you tell us a bit about the process of making your work?
My process is a little involved, and really rooted in material exploration. I spend a lot of time thinking through the bodies I make before I even make a drawing; it is much less about the objects themselves. Once an idea takes root in my head, I really fixate on it, and I can spend weeks, or even months thinking through every facet of it. A lot of the ideas don't ever make it out of my head. I'll spend so much time tearing them apart that the idea becomes boring, or I modify it until it's totally unfeasible. I think a lot of it comes from my ADHD, which I only got diagnosed with a couple of years ago. I really struggle to get to the drawing, or writing it out, it's just an organizational step that my mind can't take. But I can definitely hyperfocus, and do all the same sort of modification and fleshing out I would usually do in a drawing entirely in my head. It's not a very efficient method, and it feels really limiting a lot of the time, but it makes the objects I finish precious to me. I carry them around for so long, and so many of them I forget along the way which the ones that make it out and into the world really feel like pieces of my mind.
Of course, all of this is before I even get to making the work. The process of making is really linked to physicality for me, especially since so much of what I make is heavy and dangerous. My process evolves and the pieces change as I get more and more used to the materials, and as I draw ideas and inspirations from the environment around me. For example, I started thinking of the fire and the charcoal from the wood I burnt as a material while I was in residence at the Wassaic Project in upstate New York. There was a huge burn pile there, and I would salvage wood from it all the time which set me thinking of what I could do as far as burning the wood for myself. So, I started setting fires on sheets of found wood. After working with it for a while, I've really started to find a way for my hand to play a really important role in the charring and the hole that comes from the fire. In a certain sense, the fire has become another artist's tool for me as I've started to learn how to predict how and where the wood will burn, and I really lean into that control. At the same time, fire is fire, you know? So it can be really hard to know exactly what it will look like. That balance of randomness and control is a really fun place to operate, and it makes the choices I make after that really a response to this process that I can shape but not execute so precisely.
What are you working on at the moment?
Well, at the moment I've been putting together a lot of proposals for public art projects, so it has been a lot of pulling what's in my head down to earth in a big way. But outside of those proposals, I have a few paintings I've been trying to put together. I know it's almost trite to say this, but the pandemic has really changed my practice and affected me, as far as my production. I am lucky that I have a backyard, so setting the fires I need for the paintings is really easy! But the motivation has been a struggle (as with everything in the world right now). But, I have to say I'm kind of grateful for it as it has slowed down my process and production a lot. Usually, with all the time I spend thinking about the objects, they sort of pop out in a form that's close to how they'll live forever. Now, I'm sort of slowed down on every level, and the paintings get to live a lot of different lives.
Your two works in Eternal Flame bridge sculpture and painting. The materiality is strong and evident. Can you talk about merging disciplines and your use of raw materials?
I'm a printmaker at heart, and so a lot of the lessons I've learned in the print shop come up in my broader practice. In particular, problem solving and material knowledge come up all of the time, and they are what really propelled me into this weird fusion/middle-ground. I have spent a lot of time really hesitant to call the works I make paintings or sculptures, and in truth I have pushed back for a really long time against actually making “paintings.” I don't know why, but they always struck me as pretentious, or ostentatious. I guess this is my response to how I have perceived painting for so long. I have been making sculptures for a really long time, and I have a really intuitive feel for handling materials in three dimensions. I wanted to bring that intuitive feel back down to the two dimensional surface, without sacrificing the depth that the sculptural works allowed me.
It feels good to break that surface; there's so much tension there, and shattering that tension is so satisfying. I like the raw materials for the same reason. In my sculptural practice, I use so many raw and found materials, it just felt like an obvious choice to bring it together. Not only that, but the raw materials heighten that tension for the viewer. You can feel the violence of breaking and forming those tensions with these materials as the untouched materials draw you directly to the action in the work. You can't deny it, there's no room for it. The formal elements don't distract from the action, all you can see is the action. All you can see is my hand. It feels like a reverse minimalism; I'm using similar materials and sparse traditional art tools, but the goal is to heighten the focus on my hand, and the unpredictability of the objects.
What are some references you draw upon in your work? Are there any themes in particular that you like to focus on when creating?
I draw a lot of inspiration from the environment around me, both the built environment and the natural one. You should see my phone camera roll: it's basically a moodboard of random perfect moments I encounter in the street and on trails. All of my work really reflects what I'm seeing, and what I really focus on. Again, it's the ADHD, any given moment I can get distracted entirely by whatever is in the world around me. Which is kind of a blessing and a curse. I end up horribly overstimulated a lot, and I'll absolutely freak out, or start stimming. But it also tunes me into really seeing a lot of things I might otherwise miss. I am almost always thinking of something I've run into outside when I'm making, and my material choices usually reflect it. In fact, I usually get my materials from those same spaces, so the works very literally come from the references.
Dante in his Brooklyn studio.
One of the most memorable, was a hike I went on in Albany this year. I was there just after a forest fire, or a controlled burn, and about half the trail was burnt. Obviously I collected a lot of wood, wood that I'm still working with, but also the image of that charred forest is one that I'm thinking of all the time when I make these works. I'm also always thinking about what I'm reading, like lately it's been Fred Moten. Identity formation is a really huge theme in my work, and poetry and art as a part of that, so Moten really makes a lot of sense for me to think about. I focus a lot on the land because of the relationship of indigeneity and diaspora to land and landscape, so those themes really roll up in the work in a big way. That's where the identity plays in: my identity is shaped so completely by these forces of indigenous and diasporic histories, not to mention my childhood in rural America. These influences really make me think about chains and linkage to the past and future, but also about land and the stories that land can tell. I believe the raw materials and found objects really let me reconnect to those stories.
Where are some of your favorite spaces that support contemporary art or design? Now that the art has an online presence has that changed?
I'm really drawn to artist run spaces! Which I promise I'm not just saying because Project Gallery V is an artist run space that I like a lot. I think there's something amazing about artists taking control of the means of their own production, and something so powerful about the support they can lend to each other. The longevity of those spaces is usually pretty short lived, but they burn so brightly and do so much for contemporary art, and I really thrive on seeing those spaces turn up, even when it's so sad to see them go. And now with the emphasis on digital curation, I genuinely think those spaces are so much more important than ever. It's a real democratization of the playing field, and I think it gives a lot of room to these spaces to play around and operate without the dangling sword over their heads, although maybe it's just a different sword. I would also be totally remiss if I didn't bring up what is probably my favorite art space in the country, CAMSTL. Not an unproblematic fave, I know, but there is something absolutely beautiful about a free, relevant, and contemporary art museum. CAMSTL's model is the only one that I feel a museum should have in this day and age: free, open to the public, art as a haven and a safe space. They're accountable to their public, and they've taken their licks for the shitty things they've done. They'll probably keep fucking up, like museums always do, but they'll engage their community and learn from it, which is way more than I can say for most museums.
Do you have any shows coming up? Anything else you would like to share?
I do! I have a show opening in March, at Clark University in Massachusetts. It's an amazing group show I'm so excited to be a part of, and it's called The Future is Latinx. It's an incredible group of artists, all of whom I feel so lucky to be in a show with. There's something really powerful in my mind about a group of Latinx artists really envisioning a future for ourselves, and carving out space for it together. So, if you find yourself up that way take a look! As far as beyond that, I'll have to keep you posted. I usually put those updates on my instagram, @d_m_ojeda, so if you want to keep an eye out for it, just give me a follow!
Dante Migone-Ojeda’s work is included in our show “Eternal Flame,” Jan. 1st – Feb. 28th. Visit his website or Instagram (@d_m_ojeda) to see more of his work.