James Siena & Katia Santibañez

Two Plus Two Equals Three is a joint exhibition for artists and partners Katia Santibañez and James Siena. The exhibition includes a range of Siena and Santibañez’s individual and collaborative work: featuring Santibañez’s hand-painted ceramic collaborations with Michael Ballou, and hand-colored collaborative etchings with printer Anthony Kirk; Siena’s hand-colored ceramic jug; the artists’ individual and collaborative etchings with Harlan & Weaver; and woodcut prints from the artists’ ongoing project with master printer Mae Shore, who writes, “Move by move these images were created, alternating between Katia’s and James’s hands. Each layer is recognizable to their particular style but comes together in the most harmonic way.” 

Katia Santibañez’s work utilizes grid structures to examine the intricacies and minutiae of organic forms. Beginning with a grid, she approaches the canvas precisely and allows every inch to have its own expressive quality. Santibañez examines how objects of nature can be structured to magnify a canvas. Layers of sharp, kaleidoscopic patterns come together to create hypnotic, yet tranquil abstract canvases. There is a vibrancy reflected through the order. The mixture of a rigid formal base with swirling swaths of color leads viewers to contemplate each component as its own entity while simultaneously absorbing how they come together as a whole. 

James Siena is a New York based artist whose complex, rule-based linear abstractions have situated him firmly within the trajectory of modern American art. His artwork is driven by self-imposed predetermined sets of rules, or “visual algorithms,” which find their end-result in intensely concentrated, vibrantly-colored, freehand geometric patterns. Siena works across a diverse range of media, including lithography, etching, woodcut, engraving, drawing, and painting.