STOWAWAY presents RTO, a solo exhibition by Vanessa Gully Santiago, on view May 17–June 21, 2025. Immersed in the ambient glow of late-night screens and office detritus, Gully Santiago’s paintings explore the entangled relationship between labor, desire, and digital fatigue in the age of the “Return to Office.” Her fragmented female figures—entwined with printers, air purifiers, and other inert workplace objects—navigate a world where corporate life bleeds into personal space, and the body becomes both tool and relic.
Through lush, chiaroscuro-inflected scenes titled with exact timestamps, Gully Santiago captures moments of eerie familiarity: women slumped over keyboards, embraced by machines, or caught mid-gesture in acts of resistance or surrender. Drawing on feminist, surrealist, and institutional aesthetics, her work critiques the soft coercions of contemporary labor culture while holding space for ambiguity, ambivalence, and fleeting intimacy. RTO offers a haunting yet tender look at the emotional afterlife of productivity.
