PERPETUAL MOTION MACHINE

Sculpture, Installation

Solo Exhibition, Louise Hopkins Underwood Center for the Arts,Lubbock TX

Completed

2026

The exhibition expands Santana’s ongoing investigation into the visibility and invisibility of labor: physical and often disconnected from any meaningful outcome. Sculptures resembling tools, workstations and agricultural implements appear perpetually ready to perform a task. Their processes demand very high effort while yielding almost nothing.

Productivity turns into choreography, efficiency becomes spectacle and usefulness collapses into absurdity. By creating unusual relationships between bodies and machines, Santana reveals both the inherent beauty and the quiet violence embedded within systems of production.

Repetition is central to the exhibition. Repeated objects and gestures may initially appear orderly, but their accumulation reveals the time and fatigue embedded in their production. Choreographed movements begin to resemble mechanical processes. Glitches suggest physical exhaustion and numbness. An action reaches its conclusion only to begin again.

Perpetual Motion Machine creates an unstable space between functional object and theatrical prop, productivity and futility, reality and fantasy. As these distinctions become increasingly difficult to identify, the exhibition asks whether the machine serves the worker, or the worker has become part of the machine.