What is my work about?
My work navigates a tension between the inert and the animate. I consider the different degrees of life embedded in objects, by empathizing with them, researching their history and reorienting their embodied function. Through sculpture, photography and sound, I produce a precarious unity between an object’s history and human emotions. The connections between people and objects go beyond the immediacy of surface and precedents.
Artist Statement
Immigrating from Guatemala as a child, the universal language which helped me adapt best was technology. I found comfort in this medium because it did not require that I speak a specific dialect. I have few recollections of my early years and only really know myself from my time relocated to the US and its resulting curiosities and struggles. Without close family/cultural connections my early understanding of faith, labor, and love were always in question. To acknowledge the past is now to look at old photo albums and collect commercially available objects. These objects somehow mark a past that that requires attention to understand the present.
I create work that relates directly and obliquely to physicality, memory, and space. Through sculpture and photography I engage both new and archaic technologies. I realign the previous function of these materials in order to give structure to that which is seemingly ephemeral. In “Perforation(Why Fathers Work)” I compiled a 16mm film from homemade and found footage that plays on a continuous loop. The footage consists of compiled clips ranging from the Guatemalan countryside in the 80’s during the civil war, footage from the first artificial insemination of a bull and the film “I Never Sang for My Father”(1970). The film plays throughout the day and abruptly cuts itself after 8 hours and unspools projecting only white light. This hybridization is an idiosyncratic invention that relays the inherent distortion of memory, akin to the way it degrades over time.
In “Teeth(Basium VIII)” I explore a basic expression of intimacy. In the video two individuals continually bite each other simultaneously, failing to connect. The title of the work derives from a poem by Johannes Secundus in his Book of Kisses (1541). In Basium VIII he questions the madness that posses someone to molest a tongue by taking a bite. Secundus’s account moved me to explore the strangeness of the body, especially when it facilitates an encounter between another and myself. A kiss is a basic mode of relation by which two beings make sense of each other. Reconfiguring the erotic ritual of kissing into an aggressive action degrades the body and amplifies the uncomfort a physical glitch.
My sculptures employ unusual arrangements of vernacular objects. I create meaning by using technology that is intended to serve a very basic function. My work is an exercise in translating, compressing, and reconfiguring memory and experience into tangible form. In “Spines(after Noguchi)” I appropriate the forms from unrealized Noguchi sculptures, which I then flattened and extended. Adding copper to the back of the pieces in concentric forms, placing them in water, and conducting electricity to them I use basic technology to create makeshift speakers that make the pieces vibrate at a 60hz wave referencing that of the humming of a refrigerator. This mechanical and chemical process also serves as an agent for hydrolysis. Not only are the sculptures humming they are also dissipating the water below them making their function limited in time. By inverting its function in both subtle and complex ways, I speak to the profundity inherent in the every day, our lived space and time.
CV
Education
2012 MFA Yale University, Sculpture, New Haven, CT
2006 BA State University of New York at Albany, Albany, New York
Exhibitions
2014
Last Days of Folly, Madison Square Park Conservancy, New York, NY
Quality of Life, BOSI Contemporary, New York, NY
Site Visit, Site 95 at Top Top Studios, Brooklyn, NY
2013
LMCC Open Studios, Building 110, Governors Island, New York, NY
Location, Location, Location. President Clinton Projects, Brooklyn, NY
For Ed:Splendor in the Grass with Olympic Lad and Lass, Yale University, New Haven, CT
Buy What You Love Rema Hort Mann Foundation, Bleeker Street Arts Club, New York, NY
Realization is Better than Anticipation , MOCA+Bellwether Cleveland, Cleveland OH
XS, Art Space, New Haven, CT
2012
Edition, Fortress to Solitude, New York, NY
Yale MFA Thesis Show, Green Gallery, New Haven, CT
2011
Building Sculpture Building, Prompt by Josiah McElheny, Edgewood Gallery, New Haven, CT
Salvajes, Asya Geisberg Gallery, New York, NY
Words and Music, Factory Underground Arts, Norwalk, CT
College Arts Association Exhibition, Hunter College Times Square Gallery, New York, NY
The Wrong Miracle, NoMinimo Galeria, Guayaquil, Ecuador
Yale MFA Second Year Exhibition, Green Gallery, New Haven, CT
2010
MMXII, Green Gallery, New Haven, CT
2008
Labs, Workspace, Bushwick, NY
2007
Pierogi Flatfiling, Artnews Projects, Berlin, Germany
Vestuary Operatics, curated by Michael Oatman, St. Anthony’s Church, Albany, NY
The Flat Files, Pierogi 2000, Brooklyn, NY
2006
Controlled Burn, Boor Sculpture Building, SUNY at Albany, NY
Fence Select Show, juror Nato Thompson, The Arts Center of the Capital Region, Troy, NY
Works on Paper, Lynch Studio, New York, NY
Ocular Gratification, Exhibition Space, SUNY at Albany, NY
Awards and Honors
2014
Container Artist Residency, Fall 2014, TBD www.containerartistresidency.com
Assets for Artists, Grantee, New York, NY
2013
LMCC, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Swing Space Residency, New York, NY
Harpo Foundation Grant(Finalist), New York, NY
2006
Roanne Kulakoff Grant, SUNY at Albany, NY
Art Departmental Award’s in Printmaking/Photography/Digital Imaging, SUNY at Albany, NY
Nomination for Presidential Undergraduate Research Award, SUNY at Albany, NY
Bibliography
“How to Measure the Quality of Life” BOSI Contemporary, Allison Galgiani , June 2014.
“The case for Appropriation: A Panel Moderated by Joy Garnett with Rob Storr, Virginia Rutledge and Oliver
Wasow” Lectures-BFA Visual and Critical Studies at SVA, iTunes U March 20, 2012.
“Primal Therapy” MFA 2012 Sculpture Catalog, Mal Ahern. 2012.
“Salvajes: Una Colectiva Inspirada en Bonaño” ARTISHOCK, Chile. 2011.
Teeth(Basium VIII) Video, 2:50 min video loop, 2012.
Teeth(Basium VIII) from Carlos Vela-Prado on Vimeo.