SEBASTIANCOLEGALVAN

Artist Statement Draft 3.03 (too long):

Through printmaking techniques and paint application, Galvan constructs images of a liminal landscape — a field caught in limbo. From shifting vantage points, they render moments from a singular environment. Their process starts with scaled down studies on vellum paper, a material used for architectural drafting. Galvan incorporates materials and software used towards urban development as a foundation for their works, tracing how systems of representation, construction, and surveillance shape our understanding of landscape. Their palette draws from the shifting values of CMYK inks used in commercial printing, to align with film stocks used for aerial surveillance, urban planning, and military operations. This connection extends their interest in extrapolating images from their underlying mechanisms. The paintings are composed of elongated halftones, enlarging the negligibly small marks that viewers most often encounter through printed images until they become the dominant visual structure. Stretched beyond their original function, these dots become lines that gesture toward the physicality of a paint stroke.

Paint is applied in monotonous, repetitive, and thick patches, imparting the surfaces with a textile sensibility. By stretching the relatively instantaneous process of printing halftones across the duration of painting, Galvan transforms a mechanism of reproduction into a means of reflection. The paintings become records of both an image and the labor required to reconstruct its underlying systems.

The surfaces of their work are “whitewashed,” through repeated layers of heavily thinned lead white paint applied over transparent gesso. This process produces hazy gradients between paint and substrate, while the varying hues beneath the white draw attention to whiteness as an active intrusion into the surface rather than a neutral or “pure” material state. The residual presence of lead within domestic structures introduces another material tension, using the familiar and potentially hazardous substance to evoke a sense of the uncanny or unheimlichkeit. Galvan often builds the frames for their work from poplar wood. The wood serves as frame, scaffolding, or window, extending the paintings’ investigation of structures through which landscapes are constructed, viewed, and understood. The tree’s historical context as a site of lynching introduces a history of racialized violence into this structural vocabulary, providing a lens through which Galvan approaches the work as a means of coming to terms with suffering and grief.

Their work has been significant in forming an understanding on displacement. They turn to their familial history as a dichotomy between voluntary and involuntary uprooting, to exercise trauma converging from their black, hispanic, european, and indigenous ties. They use phenomena of fish being caught and change in pressure causing deformation and expansion of vestibular organs, as a bridge between displacement and their personal chronic pain within their inner ear. Animals within their work often echo this experience through a process of contortion, with elements of their bodies stretched according to mapping points positioned at a distance from a binding coordinate. This invisible coordinate functions as a theoretical site of multipositioned existence: a condition in which the soul and body are simultaneously situated apart from one another. The resulting distortions consider displacement as both a physical and psychological condition, where the body can remain present while the self is divided across multiple positions.