Tiger Strikes Asteroid Chicago is pleased to present José Santiago Pérez: ShimmeRings, a series of floor and wall-based woven sculptures that encircle the pulse and potentials of queer desire. The series recalls the artist’s erotic awakening and the emergence of his queer identity within the shimmering nightscapes of Los Angeles during the AIDS crisis between 1992-1996. L.A. parks, parking lots, streets, clubs, and restrooms became sites to experience desire’s transformational power, both personal and communal. The exhibition title references the philosopher Roland Barthes’ concept of a shimmering field of the body as it changes, goes through states, and encounters nuances.1 Shimmering is a perceptual quality that embraces the fluidity and mutability of experience. Drawing on the visuality and affect of the nightscapes and incorporating Barthes’ notion, Pérez’s sculptures reflect and refract light, ideas, and resonances that respond to the architectural space of the gallery, evoking queer desire in flux and rife with possibilities.

Pérez’s intuitively woven sculptures simultaneously shimmer between personal and shared experiences, gathering and holding memories that magnetize people. Candy-colored coils and basketry techniques produce shape-shifting containers - vessels, masks, portals, mirrors, webs, and relics - that act as carriers of meanings, identities, shared histories, and communal futures. ShimmeRings is also framed by an inquiry into what the feminist theorist Zoë Sofia calls “container technologies”2—objects, forms, orifices, and systems that hold, support, and mediate. The artist’s hands, cock rings, nets, and architectural interventions become both metaphors and materials: a queer vocabulary of containment, desire, and resistance. This sculptural lexicon is further embellished by knotting and twining—which carry their own intimate, bodily, and erotic resonances. In practicing the knot, Pérez is attaching and reattaching himself to his body and to desire. In twining, the weavers and spokes intersect and continuously twist to form a structure through tension. For the artist, the continuous helix fashioned through tension creates an erotic charge. Likewise the processes of knotting and twining remind us of our interdependence—situated and nested inside social, affective, political, environmental, material, and historical containers— and refer to networks of desire and sex in public, invoked through a visual language of craft and camp. 

Other hallmarks of Pérez’s sculptures are the visual motifs of voids and framing bands. Another conceptual thread in Pérez’s works is a rejection of Western notions of the void as empty or passive. Instead, the artist invokes ancient Mesoamerican cosmologies—specifically the void as fecund, creative, and alive with possibility. It is a deep portal between psychic realms where the power of life swirls and flows in and out of.3 The vacuum-forming space is sacred, hidden in plain sight, and always pulsing with the shimmer of desire. Like the concept of the void, Mesoamerican framing bands, or skybands, are celestial motifs that define the cosmos by encircling space. They appear in Mesoamerican architecture, sculpture, murals, and textiles and the repeated geometric motifs represent permeable borders between realms.4  They mark a separate world that remains embedded in the visible one—hidden in plain sight. The framing bands in Pérez’s sculptures and interventions mark this ambiguity—being seen yet unread unless recognized—and parallels how queer desire maps public spaces. An empty, lit parking lot becomes a site of erotic potential, invisible to most but legible to some.

ShimmeRings is also an exercise in memory work for the artist. The titles of the works clue the viewer into a hall of mirrored memory. Franklin Commonwealth and Fern Dell refer to sites of transformative sexual encounters in L.A. Lean & Linger, Mint Portal (elastic waist), and Flagging stage choreographies of cruising. Thresh-, -Hold, and ShimmeRing mark the gallery’s architecture with desire’s transformational potential. The series returns Pérez to personal erotics and is an occasion to understand desire as a source of personal and collective knowledge and power. The erotic provides power with sharing any pursuit deeply with another person. The sharing of joy in any form bridges people and can be the basis for understanding what is not shared between them, and lessens the threat of difference.5 The erotic connection foments openness and fearlessness that extends to the many human impulses—to stretch the body to rhythms, to build art, to flex ideas.

Historically, queer, feminist, and racialized voices have had a visible hand in social dissent and dismantling entrenched structures of inequality because of their proximity to oppression. They have honored that change must be intersectional and shared in order for nonconforming forms of existence to resist and survive. The intersectional and twisting order exemplifies the inescapable and mutual dependence that we are entangled in. It is a shimmering field of the body agitating and manifesting communally for political and social change. Shimmer is the frame. Desire is the pulse. Liberation is the struggle. Experiencing shimmer in its fullness means letting go of binary thinking, linear time, and social dominance—all markers of colonial-capitalist consciousness. ShimmeRings is a poetics of seduction, mutability, and flow urging an embrace of what queer desire, thought, and intuition can possibly offer.

About the artist

José Santiago Pérez (b. Los Angeles) is an artist and educator working between Pittsburgh and Chicago. Residencies and awards include Regional Artist Residency at Contemporary Craft (2025), Surf Point Foundation Artist Residency (2025), Fiber Fellowship at Colorado College (2024), Illinois Arts Council Agency Artist Fellowship Finalist in Craft (2024), Lunder Institute for American Art Residential Residency (2022), and HATCH Residency at Chicago Artists Coalition (2019-2020). Their work has been supported by an Illinois Arts Council Agency grant, an Individual Artist Program grant from the City of Chicago, and a Chicago Artists Coalition SPARK grant. Features and reviews have appeared in Artforum, Basketry+ Magazine, Sixty Inches from Center, Newcity Art, and the Archives + Futures Podcast. He received an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is currently Assistant Teaching Professor in Studio Art at the University of Pittsburgh.

About the curator

Teresa Silva is an independent curator, co-director of Tiger Strikes Asteroid Chicago, and the Program Curator of the Center Program at the Hyde Park Art Center.