Bio

Kaitlin Santoro is an interdisciplinary artist who splits her time working between New York City and Philadelphia. Working across photography, video, glass, and printmaking, her work explores time, impermanence, loss, and generational trauma caused by cognitive impairment with a recent focus on dementia. She creates work that slowly breaks down and shifts, documenting the process and the aftermath to illustrate the fragility of memory over time. Santoro pushes the traditional boundaries of lens based, print, and glass mediums by using incompatible materials, intentionally breaking, or working with fugitive materials.
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Santoro’s work has been exhibited internationally and was most recently included in exhibitions at the International Center of Photography and in the 2021 New Prints Exhibition at the International Print Center of New York. She has attended residencies at the Manhattan Graphics Center, Pilchuck Glass School, the Sculpture Space, and Oxbow School of Art. She received her BFA from the University of Connecticut, and her MFA from the Tyler School of Art and Architecture where she received a Teaching Assistantship and received two Dean’s Grants for student research. In addition to her studio practice, she teaches at the Tyler School of Art and Architecture in Philadelphia and the City University of New York.

Statement

My work explores time, memory, and impermanence. I am interested in who gets remembered, how we are remembered, how memory changes, and why certain things are forgotten. With a family history of dementia, I seek to understand the brains lucidity, how recollections come in and out of focus, memory triggers, how much a person’s memory can be removed before they are changes, and the endurance it takes to try to hang onto one’s mind when dealing with a cognitive disease. I try to show the personal experience of losing one’s memory and doubting one’s mind.
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The human body is represented in all my work – using the actual body or representational objects. Using a broad range of materials and techniques that show age or break down over time – like dissolving sugars, water to erode, and incompatible materials – my work shows the fragility of time and the fleeting nature of one’s life. Activation is needed to view the passive performances, typically using the human body or natural materials as the catalyst. The use of photographic theory is at the heart of my practice. I seek methods and processes that act like photographs without the use of a lens, that can act as moments of time that are already gone. I am fascinated by what remains and lives on after one is lost. I am compelled to explore how we impact those around us and the inevitable absence that will one day occur.

www.kaitlinsantoro.com

@kaitlinsantoro