Like many art majors, Master of Fine Arts student, Oscar Soto has been involved in art since he was a child, but he became more involved in junior high and high school. As his teenage years got tough, Soto found art to be his outlet. When he started to meet other artists from\ different high schools, he realized that there was a community of creatives that he felt he belonged to. After attending the South Carolina Governor’s School for the arts summer camp, Soto realized that art was his center.
After completing his Bachelor of Fine Arts at Winthrop in 2007, The artist worked for a year doing picture framing but suddenly it became important to him to experience a little bit more of the world. He started teaching English abroad and moved to South Korea for a few years. What he found even more important was to go to Chile for a while because that is where his family is from.
“I spent a little over four years in Chile,” Soto said, “learning the language and meeting my family and trying to develop a deeper sense of who I am and where I’m from. That’s what allowed me to finally come back to art. I came back to Winthrop in part because Winthrop had given me such a feeling of home during my undergraduate experience here. Since I’ve been here, I’ve suddenly discovered woodworking. I think being away from the university for so long got me interested in taking advantage of the things that universities have in terms of facilities that I can’t do from an apartment somewhere.”
Due to his interest in woodworking and technology here at Winthrop, after graduating, he would like to be somewhere where traditional woodworking is combined with new technologies such as CNC routing and laser cutting.
After having a past undergraduate professor who Soto described as a “stickler about craft” who would have the students build their own paintings, stretchers, and panels, Soto learned to take pride in the structures he was painting on and when he came back for his master’s degree, he was still planning on painting, but he was having a lot more fun working in the woodshop building the structures for the paintings.
“I started to try building things out of wood, out of scrap wood,” Soto said, “especially when I first came back and I had just gotten back from Chile. Three days after I came back from Chile, I was in grad school. It was a really sudden change and I didn’t have a lot of materials anymore. I didn’t have a lot of possessions at the time.
So in our wood studio, we have lots of scrap wood that people just leave for other people to use…I started just making sculptures using the scrap wood to kind of learn to think with wood.”
Recently, Soto has been designing on Rhino, a 3D modeling software program. Most of his sculptures are two chairs that require two people to balance or co-
operate to use. To come up with the designs the artist will either start making chair shapes or he will start with the circle that might be the pivot point of the chairs, before drawing lines out from there, and toying around with ideas using the 3D modeling software.
“It’s nice because you can change ideas pretty quickly because you’re not working with any actual wood yet. So, eventually, some kind of new challenge or idea will come up and then I’ll start honing in on that,” Soto said. “I get a 3D model that [is] designed then, also using a computer, slice that into shapes that I can
then cut templates for those shapes using the CNC router and then I can cut pieces of normal wood like two chunks of two-by-fours or whatever and fit those to the template. It’s kind of an involved process but the start of the design is just those common ingredients, maybe two chairs and a fulcrum and then trying to find a challenge through the 3D modeling software and then trying to figure out how to build it.”
From Mar. 22 to Apr. 9, Oscar Soto’s work will be featured in the 2020-2021 Master of Fine Arts Thesis Exhibition in the Elizabeth Dunlap Patrick Art Gallery.
“The exhibition is only going to have three sculptures in it,” Soto said. “Each of them, as I described, are going to have two chairs with this sort of balancing requirement. One of them looks pretty much just like a giant see-saw.”
Soto explained, “I’d like people to look at them and just imagine what it would take to use them because they are always more difficult to actually use than they might look at first. If you even think about your childhood playground with see-saws on it, a see-saw looks like a simple, fair system but not everybody has the same confidence. Definitely not everyone’s the same physical size as each other. Not everyone has that go-to partner who’s going to hop on the other side with them. So, even such a simple system like that is already actually requiring a lot of complex social negotiation and not everyone is going to be coming to it equally.”
Oscar Soto will also be involved in a Winthrop University Galleries Virtual Artist Talk at 11:00 am on Mar. 25. The event will count as a cultural event and will be hosted on Blackboard Collaborate.
Photo by Olivia Esselman
