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Miguel Angel Montoya is a Colombian artist based in Amsterdam. He graduated of Master of Arts in Visual Arts In Situ at The Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp.
His multidisciplinary approach has taken him to work with diverse materials and practices such as photography, relational art, land art, ceramic, silkscreen and more recently fabric and clothes. Even though is often challenging, Montoya still enjoys learning new skills and experimenting with different techniques; he finds the struggle with new materials and the act of overcoming their intrinsical obstacles an important part of his creative process.
Researching about his family history, Montoya found a picture from his grandmother’s sister in which she wears a very particular dress that doesn’t correspond with anthropological and historical studies of the folk clothing in Colombia. After extensive research, in view of the impossibility of finding the origin of this dress, he decided to reconstruct the dress from scratch with his own design.
During his residency at GlogauAIR he used this process as a catharsis, a way to approach this dress lost in time a hundred and seven years ago, making it to fit himself, wearing it, embodying the impossibility of a concrete answer, embracing the void of the absence of a closure.