NADA New York 2024
Booth P23"The materials in the resulting compositions serve as a reminder of the permeability of Spectacle. Within them, colorful cartoon characters escape the celluloid of their earliest iterations, taking form as molded petroleum plastic, delicately painted offshore some decades prior, and rendered again as photograph by a digital light sensor. Each piece is made weightless by Nando's lens, fluttering across a spaceless plain of rust, chain, wood, computer board, glass, cardboard, and plastic. Each material, I am told, with its own specific origin story relating to his Hinterland, Buffalo, and it's deindustrialization."
- Kelsey Sucena, "Harvesting Data: American Hegemony and the Course of Empire", 2023
--
Creating complex in-camera assemblages of objects found in thrift stores or on the street, theoretical texts, movies, currency, and other recognizable cultural detritus, Alvarez-Perez’s photographs offer a meditation on the long term effects of globalization, deindustrialization, and the financialization of the American economy.
Anchoring the presentation are two large-scale photographs that consider the confused post-war American matrix of kitsch and avant-garde, spectacle, and political action. Several objects recur throughout the works: polaroids of political events photographed on screens (9/11, January 6th, etc.), that invert the apparent truthiness of the snapshot photograph; cut outs of American presidents' heads; visual art references; 90s era films that reflect the American obsession with the so-called 'end of history'; and American currency, all of which test the illusionary limits of our political imagination.
These are complemented by a grid of four small works, in which all objects depicted are at a 1:1 scale. Alongside photo-sculptural works, in which aluminum prints of Alvarez-Perez’s neighborhood in Buffalo, NY—brief visual poems—and American currency are embedded in untreated steel plates, which will rust with time.
Utilizing materials that are produced locally in Buffalo, Alvarez-Perez recalls the history of robust industry—grain, iron, steel—that anchored the economy for over 100 years and subsequently collapsed, leading to reverberating economic hardship that continues to echo throughout Western New York. While this work is informed by the ongoing history and economic struggles of a specific region, it mirrors larger national and international structural changes. It questions how the richness of our visual images seem to exist in inverse proportion to our lived experience of austerity. Furthermore, it highlights the apparently unconsidered surfaces of our material world to reflect the American empire’s political economy on the cusp of imminent change. The rustiness of the Rust Belt is here proposed not as an image of a lost past, but one of a shared future.
This presentation is accompanied by a new publication, with an essay by Kelsey Sucena, Alfred University Professor of Photography.