Gallery
Angelo Lontok
About the Artist: Angelo Brandon Lontok is a graduate student whose artwork examines the spaces he inhabits through the maximalism of urban design and the flatness of the digital world, through acrylic paint and digital illustration. He previously studied neuroscience and painting at the University of Southern California, and is currently pursuing an M.S. in Narrative Medicine here at Columbia University, where he aims to incorporate medical storytelling in his creative works through his exploration of identity and the body.
Artist Statement:
The cortical homunculus (‘little man’) resizes the human figure based on the amount of space dedicated for processing each body part in the sensory and motor cortex. Using the imagery of homunculi, these paintings acknowledge identity as a performance for others, as they size up what matters, and ignore what doesn’t.
My series 'Surfaces,' originally on display at the Roski School for Art and Design at the University of Southern California (Spring '24), explores the contradiction between the self as something to experience versus something to display: the works integrate self-portraiture with generic representations of identity, cortical processing in the brain’s outermost layer, and the flatness of a digital screen.
Baptism and Communism (in a studio apartment bathroom)
Medium: acrylic on unstretched canvas
Purgatory (14th street)
Medium: acrylic on unstretched canvas
Twink Death
Medium: acrylic on unstretched canvas
Virtual Death
Medium: acrylic on unstretched canvas, thread