Some Kind is an installation that was first presented at the exhibition Wrestling with the Image: Caribbean Interventions, held at the Art Museum of the Americas in 2011 within the framework of About Change, a program of multiple exhibitions dedicated to art and the contemporary cultural perspective of Latin America and the Caribbean, led by the World Bank’s Art Program in collaboration with the Inter-American Development Bank Cultural Center and the Art Museum of the Americas. The work is comprised of twenty small pieces that were made from wood, brass, steel, and aluminum. Each piece is unique, but all of them have a common formal typology, similar to that of a hammer. In the words of the artist, this installation alludes to the idiomatic expression “to hammer something out.” Thus, the hammer functions as a utilitarian reference point translated into a poetic and polysemic realm, just like the many meanings of the popular saying and their use according to the context. Santiago Cal has explored wood carving throughout his career, due to the physical qualities of the material, its long history in different ancient cultures, and its historical and geographical reference points. He approaches wood using manual processes in such a way that his sculptures propose a poetry that may seem to be outdated for highly industrialized societies. In this sense, Some Kind suggests a kind of irony: it is comprised of unique handmade pieces that together look like they belong to a series, with a quality that resembles that of industrial achievements.
Santiago Cal was born in San Ignacio, Belize and has been a resident of the United States since 1986. He earned a bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts from Kutztown University of Pennsylvania in 1995 and a master’s degree in Fine Arts from Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond in 1998. Since 2000 he has resided in Nebraska, where he is an associate professor of art at Hixson-Lied College at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. His work is mainly comprised of sculptural projects that incorporate allusions to his private life or to family memory through a narrative charged with allegorical elements that establish associations between the private sphere and world events or popular imaginaries. Woodcarving is a central process in his work. With this he creates figurative representations through a formal treatment related to the expressiveness of artisan carving or popular artists. The iconographic references in his pieces come from a global visual culture and his work is framed within personal investigations of the installation and the legacy of modern and contemporary sculpture. Since 1995 he has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions, including Zero: New Belizean Art (2000-2002), an exhibition held in various countries, and Landings (2004-2010), which was a complex network of exhibitions in cities in the Americas and Europe on the contemporary art of Central America and insular and continental Caribbean. Cal has worked on contemporary art projects that seek the affirmation of the cultural self-determination of Belize, a country that gained full independence from the United Kingdom in 1981. On this theme, he created two installations at the Art Museum of the Americas in 2016 as part of the 35th anniversary of Belize’s independence.
