Ernesto Hidalgo

Ernesto (EJ) Hidalgo (b. 1997) is a Filipino, Canadian-born printmaker from Toronto, Ontario, Canada, currently residing in the town of Newmarket, Ontario. In June 2020, he received his BFA in Studio Visual Arts at York University’s Specialized Honours Program. In his Junior and Senior years of undergrad, Ernesto worked as a Print Media Assistant at the university’s printmaking studio, allowing his profound interest in print to excel. This momentum amassed him prestigious awards, honorariums, exhibitions, and opportunities within his final years of academia, namely the Jeannie Thib Print Media Award, his collaborative debut show The State of Not Knowing with co-artist Deanna Gisborne, and commissions from the university’s Fine Arts Faculty itself.

Ernesto specializes in screenprint, photo-based processes, and bookmaking. By utilizing these methods of print, he contextualizes ideas of phenomenology, existentialism, and philosophy brought forth by the human sensorium, emphasizing the significance of our metaphysical presence and exercised further by the interhuman, mechanical process of printmaking itself. With an affinity for minimalism, he also visualizes and reinvents these notions into ambiguously conceptual forms that are hazy, yet familiar, relying on interactivity to drive the viewer into a state of realization and curiosity. Recently, Ernesto has been delving into aspects of sound, picking apart the inner workings of acoustic ecology and sonic practices as an art form.

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