One Man’s Trash

I‘ve already rescheduled last-minute once on local artist Osiel “Ozzie” Gonzalez by the time I show up 10 minutes late to Santa Fe nonprofit Vital Spaces’ Southside location at the old outlet mall, and he’s crawled inside the small house he’s constructed as the centerpiece to his upcoming solo show on the Midtown Campus, Tendonitis. He calls the piece “Shabby Math,” an homage to the small house’s informal dimensions.

Gonzalez has held studio space in the former retail location for several months, and he tells me something-or-other about how he’s always been obsessed with architecture and woodworking, even going so far as to take woodworking classes at the Santa Fe Community College and spend free time poring over architecture books and YouTube tutorials. It shows, and though the house itself is spartan (four wood walls, some rebar and a couple glass windows), it oozes a certain high quality at first blush, even if it is imperfect. It is, in fact, imperfect on purpose—nearby, a similarly purposefully janky side table sits with screws protruding from its top; nobody’s going to use this table; nobody’s going to live inside “Shabby Math”—Gonzalez says he kind of hopes to just place it someplace outside after the show to let nature take it. Still, considering he built the thing out of discarded materials, there’d be worse places to seek shelter. And that’s kind of the point.

Gonzalez’s most recent pieces are made from reclaimed materials, most often leftover items from construction sites. Some foremen hand over old pallets, scrap wood and scrap metal willingly, other materials Gonzalez finds in dumpsters and on curbs awaiting trash pickup. As the organic next step in his ever-evolving practice, the very materials themselves become both show and statement pieces. The pallet that makes up the “Shabby Math” floor would otherwise have made its way to a landfill long ago; some useless piece of perforated metal can be repurposed as part of a painting’s frame rather than a another discarded bit of refuse.

“There’s a whole slew of reasons: the...idea of recycling materials, not taking things for granted, using everything you’ve got—of seeing things anew,” Gonzalez tells SFR. “I’m turning it into something functional, but I’m also interested in the idea of non-function; a big pike in the center of a floor, or a chair, only it’s actually upside-down.”

The son of first-generation Cuban-Americans, Gonzalez moved to Santa Fe nearly two years ago after growing up in Miami, attending Emerson College in Boston for film and briefly traveling through Europe. His grandfather was a founder of the anti-Castro Alpha 66 paramilitary group, he says, and as Gonzalez is named for him, he’s feared returning to his parents’ homeland in case that name gets flagged. His grandfather now lives in America and still talks politics to this day. His parents, he says, are “weird eccentrics with the spirit of artists.”

“I remember getting off the plane in Santa Fe, and I was just wearing a T-shirt.,” he recalls. “I didn’t know it was cold here, but...I grew to like it.”

Before he arrived, however, Gonzalez had already shifted his focus from filmmaking to painting.

“I’d kind of started painting in college, but I had this girlfriend at the time, and she gifted me canvases and a set of oil paints. That opened me up.”

Over time, Gonzalez says, his paintings started expanding into the third dimension. Using nails, wire and other assorted debris, the pieces started bursting out of their frames more and more until his practice shifted to the more sculptural. Using discarded materials came soon after.

“I like having limitations like that, because I’m an over-thinker and that can lead to over-working,” he tells SFR. “I like knowing I’m bound by the materials I have, because if the materials were never-ending, I think I would just explode or something; I don’t want to waste; I feel like the world is more fucked up that it’s ever been, and being an artist in the day of robots and AI, the human presence, something physically there, doing the thing yourself—being a human is almost becoming obsolete, COVID has exposed that, in a sense, and I feel an obligation to living life.”

This is where some of his classes in woodworking came in. Knowing he wanted to comment on waste and the idea of humans engaging with functional or non-functional pieces and spaces, he then learned to draft simple plans and “how to do stud framing, a window, door framing, a foundation...”

He points to a door resting against a temporary wall in his cluttered space and excitedly announces he’s recently learned to build them. He pulls an odd painting with a self-made frames from the rubble, then another with wires protruding from its face; then another; and another.

“I think about all the interesting stuff artists could do with this trash,” he says. “For me, it helps.”

Osiel Gonzalez: Tendonitis:

11 am-5 pm Sunday, Aug. 8-Sunday, Aug. 22. Free.

Southwest Annex@Midtown Campus, 1600 St. Michael’s Drive

RSVP at ogonzalez1495@gmail.com