Hugo Montoya’s exhibition, Made In Americas, provides us with a subtle but unabashed perspective on our past and present. Through the use of meticulously scavenged materials, Montoya’s process is a structural metamorphosis that keeps with it each object’s shared histories, metaphysics, alternative lives, and emblems of social identity. Montoya’s compositions blur distinctions, humor, and underscore the parallels in which material objects are used to symbolize cultural representation.

Hugo Montoya’s sculptures become repositories for the meaning people project on them. Symbolic anthropology studies symbols and the processes, such as myth and ritual, by which humans assign meaning in order to address fundamental questions about human life. Hugo distorts these notions of context. Religious objects typically transcend their thing-ness: a cross might just be two pieces of wood but it represents something very different; a menorah is just a candelabra, except that it’s not. This kind of symbolism precariously, and at times mischievously, combined with a Cleveland Indians baseball cap, a mini wicker chair, a mid-century coat rack, Montoya then imagines the implications. It is no longer sufficient to be sensitive to the settings and situations in which a singular object is placed - we are asked to consider each work’s life and how it will be continually reinvested with new meaning. They focus on the evolution and transformation of humanity, as well as its causes and consequences.

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