Jaime Alvarez, Consumption
February 2–April 14, 2018
Reception: Friday, March 2, 5:30–8 pm
2600 N 5th St., Philadelphia, PA
Taller Puertorriqueño is pleased to announce an Artist Reception for its current gallery show Consumption, an exhibition of photographs together with an installation by the Puerto Rican-American artist Jaime Alvarez. The reception will be held Friday, March 2 from 5:30 to 8 pm. For his first solo show at Taller, Alvarez has photographed found and discarded objects to explore themes of intimacy, sentimentality, and loss. The exhibition came about from his 2016 residency at RAIR (Recycled Artist in Residency), which operates out of a recycling center in North Philadelphia.
Alvarez shapes these discarded items by painting them either white or black, creating a uniformity among them that helps the viewer to focus on each object’s weight, contours, and the emotions evoked. Although many of these objects are small enough to fit into the palm of your hand, his photographs are monumental in size.
The exhibition also includes an installation comprised of the objects that appear in the photographs on the walls, creating a dialogue between the objects themselves and their photographic representations, as well as the opportunity to re-use them. By focusing on discarded objects, Alvarez calls attention to what gets lost in our increasingly throwaway society.
Philadelphia-based Jaime Alvarez’s work questions the world around us by addressing varying themes such as privacy, institutional design, concepts of time, memory and meaning, homogeneity, and as of lately, consumption. The Puerto Rican-born Alvarez studied at the Rhode Island School of Design and received his MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art.