Алехандро Альманза Переда

Andamio (Temporary Frameworks)

source: artnewsorg

Alejandro Almanza Pereda

1977 born in Mexico City, Mexico

Lives and works in Mexico City., Mexico

Education

Bachelor of Fine Arts, University of Texas at El Paso 2005

Grants

Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation Grants Program, Miami FL 2008
National Fund for the Arts and Culture (FONCA) Programa Jovenes Creadores Mexico City 2007
National Fund for the Arts and Culture (FONCA) Programa Jovenes Creadores
Mexico City 2005
Best of Show Arlene Mc Kinon Award, University of Texas at El Paso
2005, 2003, & 2002 Juried Student Art Show
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source: artliesorg

Alejandro Almanza Pereda constructs a precarious identity and oeuvre that boldly unsteadies the liminal balance between structural resolve and collapse. His work explores a paradoxical combination of the inherent transience of bicultural identity and the permanent and personal internalization of tendencies and habits related to two distinct social milieus. The artist grew up and was educated on the Texas-Mexico border, and to hear him talk about his work and life, one gets the sense that he shifted seamlessly through these distinct cultures, establishing strong connections to both without developing a fixed allegiance or unquestioned embrace of a single set of values and self-identification.

Pereda’s recent exhibit at Art in General, Andamio (Temporary Frameworks), indeed pushes the limits of gravitational instability to a conceptual and literal peak. Andamio, literally “scaffolding” in Spanish, is a temporary architectural construction built to resemble a wood frame scaffold like one might see on a construction site. In lieu of wood, however, Pereda’s Andamio is constructed entirely of fluorescent light tubes. This subtle inversion of the ephemeral and architectural re-centers glass and light—a material and element that typically permeate and undermine the opaque tenacity of architectural structure as we commonly conceive of it—and points to the negotiation of transience and permanence that Pereda’s work and artistic identity perpetuate.

Ultimately, the artist offers a redefinition of the architectural, reframing the traditionally static condition of structures and frameworks as collapsible, continuously transformable and open to continuous temporal/spatial undoing and reconfiguration. Pereda’s own cultural identity, the architecture of self-conception that informs how one perceives the world, is not a fixed or stable value set against which he measures encounters with cultural realities, but rather, it remains always under construction. And like his identity, the brilliance of Pereda’s work is defined by its own precarious contingency.

In a talk delivered at Art in General, Pereda introduced his work as a response to the difference in cultural perceptions and interpretations of physical danger in the United States and Mexico. Offering photographs of construction sites in both countries, the artist affectionately joked about the characteristically American neurosis regarding public safety—warning signs posted to the point of excess, harmless piles of dirt cordoned off with caution tape—and the similarly amusing Mexican nonchalance regarding public danger: exposed electrical wires in rainstorms, construction workers swaying to and fro on unstable platforms that hang from the faces of buildings hundreds of feet off the ground.

Previous installations have also explored the experimental synthesis of culturally specific paradigms of safety and danger. Constructing large assemblages of found objects by precariously balancing them atop or alongside each other, Pereda often sets himself to the task of neurotically and cautiously choreographing what is ultimately uncontrollable. For instance, in Equilibrium and its Derivatives,, the weight of a large, heavy, vertically tilted armoire is supported by fragile fluorescent tubes, which are in turn hazardously secured by fish tanks.

In another installation at the Queens Museum of Art, a narrow, vertical wooden plank extended many feet into the air, supporting the weight of a huge and unwieldy dresser and prompting any sensible viewer to duck and run for cover. Like an American, Pereda sees to it that the safety of these works is insured down to—in fact, through—the finest detail. All of his installations are infinitely complex force diagrams in which the removal of one element would yield certain catastrophe. Yet, like a Mexican, Pereda boldly allows danger to remain a risk fundamental to both art and life, acknowledging that the possibility of collapse is what gives existence vitality and survival its very value.