Ivan Santiago is an artist currently teaching as a Full-time Lecturer of Photography for The University of Miami, College of Art & Art History. Ivan graduated with an MFA with a focus in both Photography & Art History from Florida International University, prior to which he earned a BFA as well as a Bachelors in Anthropology. In Miami, he began to research the history of photography and became inspired by the landscape representations of the New Topographics movement and began to contextualize it as a means to document the tension between the vanishing landscape within the urban city sprawl around the South Florida he grew up in.  Ivan has been included in shows at Dina Mitrani Gallery, Dimensions Variable, The 6th Street Container, The Martin Z. Margulies Collection, The Art & Culture Center of Hollywood & The Wynwood Gallery among others. Primarily focusing on austere landscapes; his interests include uninhabited storefronts, urban waste, warehouse façades, and other environmental indicators.

What I share with you today is a small collection of what we have left behind. Here are these semi-permanent areas and plazas in and around Miami, Florida, the place I have called home all my life. Whether in the harsh, bright, contrast light of the day or in the neon-charged noir of our nights, photography has led me to focus on these strange moments of serenity and intimacy found in my suburbs. The transient development of the world outside our doors is largely a spreading manufactured one, which is often visually confrontational with the raw environment surrounding it. As a landscape photographer I stand to witness the places where these frictions remain. I want to contemplate and to be challenged by the connections with the architectural emptiness and the consequences suburban sprawl constructs. Detached from this broader view the photographs begin to invade our dreams. They inspire a commitment to fear and of solitude among the crowds. Even within the disconnected link between us, deep down in the rusty subterranean parts of our brains, these places form a common place. When I think of our landscape, I attach a fleeting allegory to it.
-Ivan Santiago