About

BIO:

Stephen Signa-Avilés is an artist and educator living in Urbana, IL, where he is an Assistant Professor of 3D Practice at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Stephen spent his formative years between Illinois, Kansas, and Michigan. His research is invested in family/personal history and its connection to wider historical narratives, while his practice is rooted in object-oriented collage, signaling the critical power inherent in hybridization. 

 Statement:

As someone who did not grow up in one place, I've wrestled with identity formation amidst dislocation. How can I 'belong' where I just arrived? How long will it take for the place we live to be called 'home'? How do social relationships inhibit or encourage the manifestation of belonging? How do places change us, and how do they change after we're gone? 

Through collection, adornment, and fabrication, I use collaged sculptural objects to interrogate personal experiences, places, and relationships, remixing and re-presenting with an ethic of vulnerability and openness. These works are a celebration of resourcefulness, using found objects and materials as much as possible. I think of collage as a metaphor for hybridity, which becomes a methodology to examine identity formation through social and historical experience. 

I believe this work is particularly important in the context of the racialized landscapes of Western colonialism and at this time in particular, as we collectively wrestle with competing narratives on what it means to be 'American.'