Tortuga presents:

Santiago’s Flying Circus: The Big Head Show

October 1 through 31, 2021.

Hours: Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays from 12-4pm. Santiago will be at Tortuga!

Fridays & Saturdays from 12-5pm.

“Who Lives There? by Santiago Pérez

Detail of “The Knight” by Santiago Pérez

A Not-so-veiled history of The Big Head Theory

We are born with a head that is already 1/2 the size of the adult stage. From there, the formation of this head, and skull, which is soft in some spots at the parts that join which are allowing for its expansion and then hardening about the age of 2-4 years old. Then, it slowly adds a few cen- timeters to its girth and breadth up to 20-25, and it reaches its full mature stage. The head houses the brain, which follows a somewhat similar growth curve, in that it is already an organ with sensations and vague memories. Then for the first 2 years it is bombarded with fully 75% of what will remain its core experiential foundation, upon which all further sources of knowledge and experience will land and build upon. This is the point where an explorer working into the nights of rapidly failing sentience came upon the idea/theory of the Big Head(s). Or, perhaps, extended the analo- gies and metaphors of Brueghel, who sprinkled his prints and paintings with disembodied human heads, as large as houses, with windows for eyes and gaping mouths and missing rear parts of the skull to show what was going on; these heads being tormented by humans of medieval intelligence, demons from the zeitgeist and inculcated by the socialization processes of that era, these heads, hapless and hopeless in the landscapes of an earth headed for an apocalypse.

The Big Head Theory has it that the head slowly, or quickly, gets too big for its britches, if it could wear britches: inside the skull the brain over the years full of ideas and sensations and experiences of all sorts, full of thoughts, sounds, and pictures. Whereupon this explorer, named D______T_____, got a little knowledge, a little education (at the Wharton School of Economics, no less), a little too much time on his hands, plus, an extremely large fortune, became president of Dunderhead Land, a country not unlike this one, and his head got too big. He was planning to be bigger than anyone or anything else, perhaps, the world. Imagine a head as big as the earth, going around the sun! To be—ha ha—the head of the galaxy. Bigger, bigger, bigger! That is the mantra! And, how does this happen? Who is going to stop this Big Head? You? We are all sleeping. Our exis- tence has become a sleep. We go about our existence, playing our reindeer games, while D______T_____ was plotting to get bigger and bigger, so big that his head, and those of his followers, would be bigger than the world, and there would be no room for the rest, the small heads. And, we know how they put us to sleep.

PRESS RELEASE FOR THE SHOW: SANTIAGO’S FLYING CIRCUS PRESENTS THE BIG HEADS, AN ‘OLD TECH’ IMMERSIVE SHOW BY SANTIAGO PÉREZ, WITH A LITTLE HELP FROM HIS FRIENDS

Tortuga Gallery presents Santiago’s Flying Circus presents The Big Heads, an old tech immersive art exhibit on October 1, 2021. The artist is Santiago Pérez, known for his surrealist and fantastical exhibits and presentations. This exhibit is no different. From a 35-foot triptych of timely relevance to the small minutiae of tiny paintings and drawings, and raucous cutouts, Mr Pérez takes us on a journey from the ridiculous to the sublime, but mostly ridiculous, but more precisely, grotesque.

The Grotesque is the marriage of the horrifying and the beautiful, the strange, mysterious, magnificent, fantastic, hideous, ugly, incongruous, unpleasant, or disgusting, and thus is often used to describe weird shapes and distorted forms such as Halloween masks. In art, performance, and literature, however, grotesque may also refer to something that simultaneously invokes in an audience a feeling of uncomfortable bizarreness as well as sympathetic pity (wiki).

Some of Mr Pérez’ recurring characters include the Big Heads, or the Grosskopfen, or in the Southwest, Las Cabezas Grandotas. In the triptych, Mr Perez paints the ultimate Big Head work. The middle part is a congregation, or perhaps a chance encounter, of hundreds, if not thousands, imagine an infinity, of Big Heads, blind, or sleepwalking, huddled and milling about, expecting not-expecting, perhaps Death, maybe already dead, Alive and Not alive, in thought, incapacitated.

The right part of the triptych shows a Knight, with a black horse in skull-bedecked armor, in a fantastic setting, the Black Sky Giants above, playing with Life and Death. The Mergatroid Knight in search of the Holy Grail, the restoration of the soul and spirit of Man and Nature, beseiged by the hortatory voices and clamor of earthly choruses of humans past and present.

The Left Part of the Triptych is the Tragedy of George Floyd, an event that has awaken the consciousness of humankind, like the death of Abel by Cain, a death, not an ending, a beginning that transcends the boundaries of earthly conscious. Now is the Time for Change, there is No Going Back.

This is Mr Pérez’ masterpiece. And, the rest of the show whirls around it, a cavalcade of imagery and energy, color, ambition and belief that art may make a difference, and take a sad song, and make it better.

He knows, because The Beatles told him so.

“Play it with Feeling” by Santiago Pérez

         This Great Evil

This great evil. Where does it
come from? How'd it steal into
the world? What seed, what root
did it grow from? Who's doin'
this? Who's killin' us? Robbing
us of life and light. Mockin' us
with the sight of what we
might've known. Does our ruin
benefit the earth? Does it help
the grass to grow, the sun to
shine? Is this darkness in you,
too? Have you passed through this
night?

From the movie, “The Thin Red
Line”, by Terence Malick