Danziger Gallery
527 West 23rd Street, 212-629-6778
Chelsea
October 11 - November 8, 2008
Reception: Saturday, October 11, 6 - 8 PM
Web Site
For Alejandra Laviada, Mexico City is more than her birthplace and home. The abandoned buildings and transitional aura of the sprawling capital city also serve as the inspiration and starting point of her original and inventive constructed still life photographs.
These photographs – exquisitely crafted large color prints – consist of elegant sculptural installations created on site from the everyday objects that Laviada finds in old and dilapidated buildings in Mexico City. The objects are mundane – dried out paint cans, old wheels, brooms, broken chairs, letters from old signage – but in Laviada’s hands each construction is both an elegant exercise in creating a three dimensional work and a two dimensional record of pieces of history that are about to vanish while a new history is created. In Laviada’s own words her work “explores the shifting relationship between photography and sculpture, whereby ordinary objects are stripped of their traditional function and perceived differently”. On numerous levels, the works are about a reconciliation of past and future, classicism and modernism.
Alejandra Laviada was born in Mexico City in 1980. She began her artistic career as a painter, graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2003. Soon after, however, she turned her attention to photography, completing an MFA in photography at the School of Visual Arts in New York. Upon graduating, she was selected as one of 11 artists to featured in PEEK – the 2007 installment of The Art + Commerce Festival of Emerging Photographers.
Since her work first appeared in PEEK, Laviada has been commissioned and published in magazines including the New York Times Magazine, American Photo, and VOGUE. She was awarded honorable mention at the XII Photography Biennial in Mexico, and her work was singled out by critics when it was most recently shown as part of the exhibit “Chisel” at the first New York Photo Festival.
This will be Alejandra Laviada’s first solo American show.