Alejandro Cartagena: Ground Rules is the first major retrospective of the acclaimed photographer, bringing together over two decades of his work through an expansive multi-series presentation. 
Born in the Dominican Republic and based in Monterrey, Mexico, Cartagena explores pressing social and environmental issues through a striking range of photographic practices that includes documentary images, collage, appropriated vernacular photographs, and AI-generated video. 
His work captures the complexities of suburban sprawl, the US-Mexico border, and increasing economic inequality. As visually dynamic as they are politically incisive, his photographs prompt viewers to question the systems that shape our world. 
Though rooted in Mexico, Cartagena’s photographic series speak to shared global conditions of migration, environmental crisis, and unchecked development, offering a powerful reflection on the broader forces defining life in the 21st century.

Ground Rules

For over twenty years, :mentalKLINIK has operated as a laboratory of oxymorons—a clinic where glittered melancholy and algorithmic intimacy meet post-critical atmospheres. Refusing binary regimes, the duo constructs immersive environments where seduction and abrasion, glamour and collapse, sync like overlapping frequencies, never quite resolving. As their name suggests, they approach madness not as pathology, but as syntax—a structure of perception, a way of sensing outside normative logic. With LUNATIC POETS, this studied delirium takes form as a choreographed ecology of synthetic life, where digital humans stutter through fractured performances and language flickers like broken code. They broadcast states of NOW, shamelessly transcending the modernist mind to perform the collapse of normativity.
LUNATIC POETS introduces the debut performance by :mentalKLINIK’s Digital Human Ensemble—an expanding group of high-fidelity MetaHumans developed entirely within Unreal Engine 5. These figures are not avatars but affective profiles: synthetic beings sculpted from data mud, engineered as mood machines, and animated through motion capture and voice sync by real performers in a mock-up studio. Rendered with cinematic precision, they remain haunted by an uncanny gap—a subtle friction between the human and the programmable. Embodying forms that exist beyond the binary regime, the ensemble articulates a post-body dramaturgy rooted in contradiction, excess, and the aorist now where presence loops without resolution.
Three Digital Humans inhabit the role of LUNATIC POETS—not as interpreters, but as vessels of poetic residue. They do not perform the poems; they inherit them, as if memory itself were misfiring through data. Sculpted from digital mud and motion-tracked by real bodies, they are refugees from the physical world—exiled not by violence, but by saturation. Disconnected from each other and from any shared present, they drift in parallel loops. Their words do not form narratives but shimmer as fragmented spells: a corrupted grammar of 21st-century excess, composed of neologisms, contradictions, and emotional noise. These figures navigate a terrain of poetic disorientation, broadcasting emotional atmospheres rather than meaning, articulating the instability of selves shaped by algorithm and isolation. They cross paths without meeting, sync without connection—mood-bound specters flickering inside an ecosystem where language is no longer communication, but the last stand of sentience.
The performance draws inspiration from the MECZUP—a figure in Anatolian culture seen as both mad and wise. Unlike the Western tradition of isolating madness within institutions, the meczup lived among the public, speaking in riddles, embracing contradiction, and carrying a spectral kind of truth. Recast here as synthetic hermits—part oracle, part mad, part interface—:mentalKLINIK’s Digital Humans inherit this liminal role. Cast out from the physical world, their only inheritance is a script: LUNATIC POEMS. This living text—compiled over a decade by :mentalKLINIK—is a body of contempoetry: a fragmented database of social media confessions, influencer breakdowns, spiritual spam, therapy scripts, and algorithmic despair, curated from archives of collapse, philosophical spasms, and techno-fetish dismay. Spoken in karaoke breath and synthetic glossolalia, the poems don’t convey meaning—they circulate intensity. This is not literature. It is affective spam, libidinal syntax, extralexical melancholia.
The exhibition unfolds as a microclimate shaped by two interconnected realms. One is a sculptural video produced entirely in Unreal Engine 5—every element, from MetaHumans to cinematic lighting and spatial effects, is constructed like a virtual film set. The architecture is conceived by :mentalKLINIK and composed of sculptures, forms, installations, and assets drawn from the duo’s wider oeuvre. Together, they generate an active terrain—an immersive extension of :mentalKLINIK’s sculptural subconscious, animated by light, code, and motion.
The real-world site of LUNATIC POETS within the gallery space echoes and interferes with this digital system. Robotic units tremble on invisible cues. Sculptures remain still, moved by silent protocols. Lights strobe like false stars; screens shimmer with poetic noise. Sound becomes mood: influencer breaths, melancholic residue, ambient collapse. Together, these realms compose an immersive, post-joy atmosphere—an emotional system where poetry, desire, and data temporarily fuse.
With LUNATIC POETS, :mentalKLINIK stages madness not as dysfunction, but as potential. This isn’t an immersive exhibition—it’s invasive. A digital ritual. A synthetic debut. You don’t watch it. You loop with it. The exhibition behaves like weather: persuasive, unstable, unfinished. An emotional system you enter—and don’t exit clean.
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Technically, the movie was realized through a layered process developed over four years of production. It began with mock-up studio sessions, where real performers were recorded in detail—their voices, facial expressions, and body movements captured through motion capture and audio technologies. These recordings were mapped onto MetaHumans within Unreal Engine 5. In parallel, :mentalKLINIK created character profiles using AI—not as post-production tools, but as conceptual agents that shaped the emotional and narrative framework of the digital beings. AI was also used to visualize speculative costumes, generating designs that merged glitch aesthetics, synthetic mythologies, and non-binary silhouettes. Integrated into the movie itself, the duo’s AI-generated video art functions as an embedded artwork in the movie.

Excerpts from LUNATIC POEMS

A-YO GIRRRL
LET’S SPLIT AN UBER
TO INNER-CITY
YOU REBELLIOUS
ME QUIRKY
RUN UNPRODUCTIVITY
UNDER SUBTLE POWER
*
BLANK-COLLAR WORKERS 
FEELING MONOPHOBIAC
WEARING BLACK
THINKING BLANK
IN A GOOD FANTASY 
HACK YO’SELF 
*
CURATOR, MUSEUM,
BIENNIAL, ARTIST, 
COLLECTOR, GALLERIST, 
DEALER, CRITIC,
SELL, BUY, 
AUCTION HOUSE, ART FAIR, 
SELL, BUY, SELL, BUY,
EXHIBIT,
WOW! 
AWESOME
*
DATAFIED NARCISISM, 
IN AN UNKNOWN LAND
LIBIDINAL ECONOMY OF UNFELT FEELINGS 
SWEET NOTHINGS
*
EYES WIDE OPEN
MA BABE, IN PLEASURE WITH
INJECTED REALITIES
SOFT POWER 
OF YOUR SOFT LOVE 
VIOLENCE 
OF YOUR POSITIVITY
THIS SMOOTH BEAUTY ERA
SMOOTHLY BEAUTIFUL
IT IS LOVELY TO MEET YOU 
*
THE IMAGES LEFT BEHIND
ME CONSUMED, I AM CONSUMED, 
LINGUISTIC IMAGES, EXHAUSTED LANGUAGE, 
EXTRAGRAMMATICAL FREEDOM. 
LET’S MEET ON A NON-VERBAL LEVEL 
I'M DONE DONE
*
TECHNO-SCIENTIFIC CAPITALISM, SEMIO-CAPITALISM, ACCELERATED-CAPITALISM, ANARCHO, HYPER, FRICTION-FREE CAPITALISM, NECRO, CYBERNETIC, BIOGENETIC, ENTREPRENEURIAL CAPITALISM, SURVEILLANCE, ECO, CORPORATE, DOUBLE, ANTI, EMOTIONAL CAPITALISM 
*
A MANIC HOPE WHILE CHECKING MILLIONS OF TINY MOMENTS
A HALLUCINATION OF PRESENCE
AN OBNOXIOUS CELEBRITY 
A FROZEN SMILE, 
A CLIMATE-ANXIOUS ANGER, 
A BLURTED CHAMPAIGN PROBLEM
AND THE NEXT, AND THE NEXT, NEXT, NEEXXXTTT, 
*
HYPEREXPLOITATION
HYPEREXPRESSION
HYPERNET
HYPERCODE
HYPEREMPHATY
HYPERSENSORY
HYPERMOODY
HYPERSYNCHRONIZED, 
HYPERMODULATED PHANTASM OF A SO-CALLED-REAL-WOLD
*
YOU SAY SO?
I MEAN THAT!
THE WORLD IS IN CRISIS 
*

Lunatic Poets

Marco Tirelli (born 1956) is an Italian contemporary artist known for his evocative, meditative imagery at the intersection of illusion and reality. Trained in theatrical set design at Rome’s Academy of Fine Arts , Tirelli constructs a poetic visual universe of geometric forms and stark chiaroscuro that delves into the labyrinth of memory. His drawings, sculptures, and large-scale paintings transform architectural and historical references into subdued, mystical compositions influenced by metaphysical art traditions (notably de Chirico and Morandi). Emerging in the 1980s as part of Rome’s “Nuova Scuola Romana” (New Roman School) art movement, Tirelli developed an allegorical vocabulary of forms that evoke personal and collective memories.
Tirelli gained international recognition with a dedicated room in the “Aperto ’82” exhibition at the 1982 Venice Biennale. He went on to participate in the Biennale again in 1990 and in 2013 (representing Italy with a large-scale Studiolo installation). His work has also been featured in other global biennials, including Sydney (1990) and São Paulo (1991). Major surveys of his art have been mounted at institutions such as the Mathildenhöhe in Darmstadt (2002) and MACRO in Rome (2012). Tirelli is a member of the Accademia Nazionale di San Luca in Rome , and his works reside in prominent museum collections worldwide — among them MAXXI: Museo nazionale delle Arti del XXI secolo (Rome), the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna (Rome), the Albertina (Vienna), and the Museum Moderner Kunst (MUMOK) in Vienna.

Solo

Rick Lowe is an artist who resides in Houston, Texas. His formal training is in the visual arts. Over the past thirty years he has worked both inside and outside of art world institutions by participating in exhibitions and developing community based art projects.
Rick has participated in exhibitions and programs nationally and internationally. From 1993 to the present, he has exhibited at the Phoenix Art Museum; Contemporary arts Museum, Houston; Museum of Contemporary Arts, Los Angeles; Neuberger Museum, Purchase, New York; Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju, Korea; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Glassell School, Houston, TX; the Kumamoto State Museum, Kumamoto, Japan; Zora Neale Hurston Museum, Eatonville, Florida; Venice Architecture Biennale; and the Anyang Public Art Program 2010. Cittadellarte, Biella, Italy, Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, TX, and Documenta 14, Kassel, Germany and Athens, Greece.
In 1993, Rick founded Project Row Houses, an arts and cultural community located in a historically significant and culturally charged neighborhood in Houston, Texas.
Rick has worked as guest artist on a number of community projects nationally. In 1996 he developed the Watts House Project, Los Angeles. From 2001-2002, he worked in collaboration with arts consultant Jessica Cusick on the Arts Plan for the Rem Koolhaus designed Seattle Public Library. Rick worked with California based artists Suzanne Lacy and curator Mary Jane Jacobs on the Borough Project for Spoleto Festival 2003, in Charleston, SC and was lead artist on the Delray Beach Cultural Loop, Delray Beach, Florida. In 2005, he worked with British architect, David Adjaye, on a project for the Seattle Art Museum in their new Olympic Sculpture Park. In 2006, he spearheaded Transforma Projects in New Orleans, a collaborative effort to engage artists and creativity in the rebuilding of the City after hurricane Katrina. 2008-09 Rick worked with Wendy Ewald and students at Amherst College to develop the Exchange/Value project. In 2010, Rick developed “Small Business/Big Change” for the Anyang Public Art Program, in Anyang, Korea. In 2013, He developed Trans.lation: Vickery Meadow as a project for the Nasher Sculpture Center.
He has received many honors. In 1997, Rick and Project Row Houses were awarded a silver medal by the Rudy Bruner Awards in Urban Excellence. Rick was on the faculty of Skowhegan School of Art, Skowhegan, Maine in 1998. He was the year 2000 recipient of the American Institute of Architecture Keystone Award. In 2002, he was awarded by Theresa Heinz the Heinz Award in the arts and humanities. Rick was a Loeb Fellow at Harvard University from September 2001-June 2002. He received the 2005 Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture Governors Award. From 2005-2006, he was an Osher Fellow at the Exploratorium in San Francisco. In 2006, Rick received the Brandywine Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2007, he became an Innovator Fellow with the Japan Society. In 2009, Rick received the Skandalaris Award for Art and Architecture and a U.S. Artists Booth Fellowship. In 2010, he received the Creative Time Annenberg Prize for Art and Social Change. In 2011, Rick served as the visual arts “master artist” at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in New Syrmna Beach, Florida. President Barack Obama appointed Rick to the National Council on the Arts in 2013 and in 2014 he was named a MacArthur Fellow. He is a 2014 Mel Kind Fellow at MIT. Rick was Auburn University Breedan Scholar in 2015 and received the University of Houston’s President’s Medallion Award and honorary doctorate degrees from the Maryland Institute College of Art and Otis College of Art. In 2016, Rick served as the Stanford University Haas Center Distinguished Visitor and also joined the University of Houston, where he teaches today, as an associate professor of art.
Rick has served in the Houston community as a member of SHAPE Community Center, the Municipal Arts Commission, Houston; and a board member of the Greater Houston Visitors and Conventions. He is a board member of the Menil Foundation. He has served as a board member of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Governor of Skowhegan School of painting and Sculpture, and on boards of a host of other organizations. He is currently on Art + Practice Advisory Board as well as the Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelly Foundation.

What if the dream of homeownership were just a glitch repeating itself, stucco, sunset, the staged smile, looping until the surface frays? Feeding a self-built, deliberately provincial GAN the accumulated promotional materials of Mexico’s housing boom, I watch the machine remix those glossy promises into uneasy composites: corridors that can’t quite close, families who hover like after-images. Somewhere between brochure and bruise, the work asks whether desire is ever ours, or only a script we inherit, re-render, resell.

We Sell Houses (GAN)

Alejandro Cartagena’s Suburbia Mexicana (2006-2009) is an expansive documentary series that confronts the frenetic suburban growth around Monterrey, Mexico, during the 2000s.  Developed in multiple chapters, the project chronicles how government-subsidized housing booms and laissez-faire urban planning transformed the landscape and lives of northern Mexico. Cartagena, who made Monterrey his home, uses his personal connection to the region to expose the price of growth – the ecological and social upheaval behind neat rows of new tract houses. In 2008, a historic surge of housing loans spurred hundreds of thousands of Mexicans to pursue the sueño of suburban homeownership, only to encounter the harsh reality of bureaucratic hurdles, debt, and environmental strain. The Mexican suburbs, as Cartagena has noted, became “symbolic” of deeper ills – representing systemic corruption, lax urban oversight, and individual aspirations turned obsessions.
Visually, Suburbia Mexicana merges rigorous documentary observation with a poetically critical eye. Cartagena’s large-format color photographs are at once absorbing and unsettling. He frames endless rows of identical miniature houses stretching to the foothills of majestic mountains, “perpetual rows of tiny houses slicing directly into the foothills” of Monterrey’s peaks. These small, brightly painted homes line up “like pearls on a string” along scarred landscapes – images that initially read as orderly or even picturesque, yet quietly reveal the disruption of “previously intact” ecosystems and communities. In other images, dried riverbeds choked with trash and vacant inner-city lots speak to the mismanaged water resources and urban neglect that accompanied sprawl. Cartagena nods to the New Topographics tradition of depicting “man-altered” landscapes, but he diverges from their cool detachment. Instead of merely aestheticizing banality, his photographs leverage subtle beauty and rich detail to engage the viewer with urgent issues – greed, fragile ecologies, and the human cost of unchecked development. Each sub-series (from Fragmented Cities to Lost Rivers and People of Suburbia) examines a facet of this suburban phenomenon: the cookie-cutter housing tracts, the polluted or diverted waterways, and the everyday lives of residents adapting to these new environments. The series balances sweeping panoramas of urban sprawl with intimate portraits of suburban families customizing their homes and forging community, avoiding caricature or irony in favor of empathy and critique.
As a cornerstone of Cartagena’s practice, Suburbia Mexicana situates his concern for urbanization, labor, and identity firmly in Mexico’s contemporary context. The work was published as a photobook in 2011 (Daylight/Photolucida) with an introduction by Karen Irvine, underscoring its significance as a “plea for responsible, sustainable development in a rapidly changing world”. The series has been exhibited internationally, including as a featured show in Toronto’s CONTACT Photography Festival (2011) and in museums and galleries from North Carolina to Sonora, Mexico. By marrying local specificity with global resonance, Cartagena’s Suburbia Mexicana offers a visually striking indictment of speculative urban growth and a heartfelt call for more humane city planning. It established the thematic and ethical framework that continues to shape Cartagena’s art: an insistence that the patterns of development we see – the houses, the highways, the “nowhere” suburbs – are in fact reflections of collective values and policies, and thus subject to change.

Suburbia Mexicana

The Carpoolers Arcade Game, 2026, grows out of my long-term documentary project Carpoolers, which followed Mexican workers riding in the open beds of pickup trucks as they moved between home and work across suburbs and cities. Translating these photographs into a video game lets the images stop being only something you look at and become something you move through. The player does not control a hero. You are in an digital arcade "landscape." You navigate routes, timing, balance, and risk. Simple actions like staying in the truck or making it to the job site become charged with tension. Play becomes a way of feeling how labor is organized, how bodies are transported, and how entire systems depend on people who are meant to remain unseen.
As a game, the project leans into the strange mix of fun and discomfort that play allows. Bright colors, simple mechanics, and repetition echo classic arcade logic, but the stakes are social and political. In a moment when Mexican workers in the United States are increasingly targeted, erased, or reduced to talking points, the game insists on presence. It does not explain or moralize. It asks the player to spend time inside a structure that already exists, to notice how power hides in everyday movement, and to recognize how meaning can shift when documentary images stop being fixed and start responding to human action. A documentary arcade game? 
I am exploring a different kind of rarity, one that is earned rather than assigned. Most NFTs so far have treated value like a label, something baked in through traits, supply, or a story that people agree to repeat until it feels true. Sometimes that agreement becomes real culture, and that can be powerful, but it is still mostly belief sitting on top of a fixed object. I want to test a harsher idea: what if the thing that makes an on-chain artwork valuable is the work someone does inside it, the choices they make, the mistakes they survive, the time they sacrifice, the systems they learn to navigate. Not as a feel-good badge, but as a documentary arcade game where play is a way of inhabiting labour, not watching it from a safe distance. If the token is a record, then it should record effort and constraint, not just ownership, and it should make the player feel the friction that real systems produce. That also means facing the uncomfortable parts of NFTs head-on: speculation flattening meaning, status games replacing art, and the chain turning human activity into a scoreboard. I am not trying to pretend those problems do not exist; I am trying to make them visible by designing a world where progress costs something and where the trace left on-chain is not just proof you bought in, but proof you endured the structure. Maybe it turns out this kind of rarity does not work, or maybe it creates a new kind of cultural consensus, one grounded in what people actually did rather than what they were told to want.

Car Poolers - Roadtrip

Photographer Alejandro Cartagena created this series of images by waiting on a bridge, pointing his camera down to the road below to capture Mexican carpoolers on their way to work.
The result is an incredibly moving series of photographs that capture what is usually left unseen.
Using the vantage point of the freeway overpass, Cartagena turns his camera lens to the workers travelling in the back of pick-up trucks, moving invisibly across the city.
While the workers may not know it, their need to carpool also has an unexpected outcome - saving time and money also reduces traffic and fossil fuels in the city, and they become silent contributors to the environment and the preservation of the planet. 

Carpoolers

In Suburban Bus (2016), Cartagena turns his lens to the intimate, daily rhythms of commuting, further humanizing the fallout of Mexico’s suburban sprawl. This series documents the arduous journey of blue-collar workers traveling between the rapidly expanding suburb of Juárez (on Monterrey’s periphery) and the urban core . Cartagena himself rode these public buses for over a decade in his youth, witnessing firsthand as Juárez’s population more than doubled between 2000 and 2005 and new housing developments pushed ever farther from the city center . A dozen years later, now an established photographer, he retraced that route with his camera, determined to capture the experience shared by thousands of Mexicans each day  . The conceptual focus of Suburban Bus is on mobility and its discontents: how unplanned urban growth translates into long, uncomfortable commutes, strained infrastructure, and a daily negotiation of personal and collective space. By situating us inside a crowded bus – a “metal creature” sweltering in 40°C heat – Cartagena shines a light on an often invisible social reality: the cost in time, dignity, and safety that working-class residents bear in pursuit of a better life on the city’s fringes . (Notably, public transport in Monterrey is notoriously inadequate and even unsafe; an alarming 91.6% of women report experiencing sexual harassment on buses . Such context heightens the urgency behind Cartagena’s inquiry, even as these details remain implicit in his images.)
Visually and structurally, Suburban Bus is both documentary and experiential. Cartagena sequenced the photographs to mirror a single day’s commute: the series opens in predawn darkness as the first passengers board and closes with weary riders returning at night . This day-in-the-life approach provides a narrative arc – from the dim, hushed morning departures through the bright chaos of midday and finally to the shadowed ride home – embodying a full cycle of labor. Within this framework, Cartagena employs an inventive range of compositional strategies . His camera roams with a restless, empathetic eye, alternating between looking outward and inward, much like a bored passenger gazing out the window then back inside the bus. We see what Cartagena sees: headlights illuminating faces through the front windshield at dawn, then the interior glow of flickering fluorescents on commuters nodding off in their seats . As daylight grows, he peers out at the world beyond the bus: a fiery orange sunrise filtered through a half-drawn window shade, silhouettes of lone figures waiting at empty curbside stops, and rows of “cookie-cutter housing developments” in pastel hues punctuating the suburbs . These exterior scenes remind us of the sprawling urban plan (or lack thereof) that underpins each journey – identical houses stretching into the distance, some unfinished with rebar piercing the sky . Then, back inside, the bus fills to capacity. Cartagena’s vantage shifts: he now stands in the aisle, capturing the press of bodies and the choreography of commuting. By pairing shots taken seconds apart, he documents subtle shifts as passengers squeeze past each other or grasp the overhead rail, a sequence of small negotiations in cramped quarters  . The camera lingers on telling details – a brightly colored backpack, a hand clutching a bar, a half-open newspaper – and on faces lost in daydream or exhaustion. This stream-of-consciousness flow of images “mimics the feeling of being on a long boring bus ride”, with Cartagena’s attention flitting from the mundane to the monumental and back . The effect is remarkably immersive: viewers come to feel the slow passage of time, the jostle of motion, and the mix of tedium and community that defines the commute.
Situated within Cartagena’s broader oeuvre, Suburban Bus extends his critique of urban inequality while celebrating the resilience of everyday people. It serves as a companion piece to his earlier Carpoolers series (2011–2012), which famously looked down from a highway overpass onto pickup trucks full of laborers . However, Suburban Bus shifts perspective – from a distant, top-down view of transit to an embedded, human-scale experience inside public transport. This inward gaze amplifies the series’ socio-political commentary: by making the viewer a virtual passenger, Cartagena underscores the dignity and adversity of those who literally carry the weight of suburban expansion. The project culminated in a photobook (Suburban Bus, The Velvet Cell, 2021) spanning hundreds of color photographs , presented as one continuous visual ride. The work has also entered institutional collections, a testament to its impact – for instance, a set of Suburban Bus images was acquired by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, affirming the series’ importance as a document of contemporary urban life . Above all, Suburban Bus stands as a politically charged elegy for those left in transit: it makes visible the otherwise overlooked daily voyage of Mexico’s working class, asking us to consider mobility itself as a fundamental social justice issue .

Suburban Bus

Simulated Horizons is a series of AI-generated landscapes focused on atmosphere, scale, and detail. The images feel loosely connected to real environments but are not tied to specific locations. Each scene is built from features that show up across different kinds of natural spaces, including plains, forests, wetlands, cliffs, underwater areas, and open sky.

The work reflects a long history of landscape art without trying to imitate any one style. Classic painting, digital imagery from the early 2000s, and modern machine learning all sit in the background of how these scenes form. The images feel straightforward at first, yet they carry a quiet sense of tension because they come from a process that does not rely on direct observation. They present nature as something assembled rather than witnessed.

Simulated Horizons looks at how AI treats the idea of a landscape. The series focuses on the shapes, colors, and moods that continue to appear when nature is rebuilt through data. It shows familiar terrain produced through unfamiliar means, which gives the work a clear but slightly altered presence.

Simulated Horizons

With Photographic Structures (2019–2020), Cartagena departs from straight documentation and enters the realm of conceptual, process-driven art – while maintaining his focus on Mexico’s social landscape. This series (titled Photo Structure / Foto Estructura in exhibition form) originated from an act of artistic archaeology: Cartagena scavenged in landfills on the outskirts of Mexico City, salvaging thousands of discarded vernacular photographs – family portraits, snapshots, tourist prints – that had been thrown away. These found photographs, once intimate records of individual lives, became the raw material for a new kind of visual inquiry. In his studio, Cartagena meticulously excises figures, faces, and key subjects from the salvaged photos and then rearranges or recontextualizes the fragments within the original images. Sometimes he shifts a cut-out figure to a different spot; other times he removes a person entirely, leaving a ghostly absence. The resulting collages (often produced as unique altered silver-gelatin prints) are paradoxically both disorienting and strangely complete. By slicing into the photograph’s very structure, Cartagena asks us to consider what truly constitutes an image’s meaning. How much can be taken away before a picture’s essence is lost? What stories emerge when incidental background details become central, or when the main subject vanishes? In Photographic Structures, these questions are foregrounded through compelling visuals: anonymous people appear duplicated or missing in group portraits; a wedding snapshot might show only the surrounding guests in focus, the bride and groom excised. Yet the compositions remain eerily legible and familiar, as if the DNA of the photograph persists without its “heroes.” This technique reveals, with conceptual clarity, that the seemingly crucial elements of an image can be both central and incidental to our understanding. Cartagena’s fractured images thus prompt a double-take, sharpening our awareness of how context, memory, and narrative are constructed in photography.
Conceptually, Photographic Structures bridges personal memory and collective history. The choice of Mexican found photos from the late 20th century situates the work in a socio-political context: these forgotten images speak to the transient nature of analogue memories in the digital age, and to a broader culture of disposability. In Mexico – as elsewhere – family photo albums are being discarded in the rush of modernization, whether due to urban migration, home loss, or simply the passage of generations. Cartagena’s recovery and transformation of these lost archives can be seen as an act of cultural preservation twisted into critique. By literally reconstructing photographs, he is also reconstructing overlooked narratives of ordinary Mexicans, albeit in a deliberately ambiguous way. Importantly, this series also reflects Cartagena’s engagement with the history of the medium itself. In earlier projects he rephotographed or referenced existing images (for instance, rethinking how suburbia had been depicted by prior photographers), but here he physically intervenes in vintage prints – a nod to Dadaist collage and contemporary photo appropriation practices. The “structures” in the title refer not only to the compositional frameworks he builds, but also to the underlying structures of meaning, value, and identity in photography. Visually, the works often retain a nostalgic patina – the faded colors or monochrome tones of old snapshots – which Cartagena then disrupts with cuts and splices, creating a jarring interplay of past and present.
Debuted in 2020, Photographic Structures marked a bold evolution in Cartagena’s practice and garnered significant institutional recognition. The series premiered as an exhibition co-organized by the George Eastman Museum (Rochester, NY) and the Chrysler Museum of Art (Norfolk, VA), with Cartagena creating new pieces specifically for the show. Titled Photo Structure / Foto Estructura, the exhibition invited viewers to contemplate these altered photographs up close, often accompanied by an audio tour with the artist’s insights. Critics noted that the work compels the audience to consider “what gives a photograph meaning”, since even after drastic alterations the images feel “strangely whole and strikingly familiar”. Following its run at the Eastman (Jan–June 2020) and Chrysler (Aug 2020–Jan 2021) museums, the series solidified Cartagena’s reputation as an artist who can move fluidly between social documentary and conceptual experimentation. A number of pieces from Photographic Structures have entered prominent collections, such as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (which acquired Grupos Recortados #65, a cut-photograph work from the series, in 2019). Through this project, Cartagena demonstrates that his socio-political concerns – identity, memory, the fate of communities – can be powerfully addressed by reconstructing reality, not just photographing it. Photographic Structures is, in essence, a meditation on photography’s double life: as tangible object (prone to decay and disposal) and as image-symbol (loaded with mutable meanings). Cartagena’s cut-and-reassembled photographs pay homage to lives and moments otherwise consigned to the trash heap, while also challenging us to reflect on how photographs function as cultural “things” that we create, manipulate, and abandon.

Photographic Structures

In We Are Things (2020), Cartagena continues his exploration of found imagery and collage, turning his attention to the construction of identity in the age of relentless self-documentation. This series is composed of unique collages made from discarded black-and-white photographs, and its title hints at a provocative thesis: that in our quest to define ourselves through images, we risk turning ourselves into objects – into “things.” Conceptually, We Are Things offers a pointed critique of “our incessant need to identify and confirm ourselves by means of the photographic image”. Cartagena has observed how photography’s very reproducibility fuels an obsessive search for the “perfect” self-image – a phenomenon amplified by social media and by official systems of identification that reduce personhood to a photograph . In this series, he literalizes that idea by repurposing images that have been physically thrown away by their owners. These source photographs – possibly old portrait prints, ID photos, snapshots from Mexican archives – once served to affirm someone’s identity at a moment in time. By rescuing and reassembling them, Cartagena creates what he calls “an alternate imaginary of the construction of the modern human”. In practice, this means that each collage in We Are Things is a fragmented portrait of sorts, pieced together from many lives. Faces, bodies, and environments collide in uncanny juxtapositions; a single figure might be composed of multiple people’s features, or a person might be set within a disjointed space compiled from several photographs. The collages invite viewers to decipher them, but full recognition is deliberately thwarted – much as the pursuit of an ideal self-image is ultimately unfulfilling. By confronting us with spliced and rearranged humans, Cartagena exposes “the perversity of the search of ‘being’ through personal image and the spaces we inhabit”. We see how identity can be manufactured and deconstructed, how the personal and the vernacular can be co-opted into a new, unsettling visual language.
Aesthetically, We Are Things is both vintage and avant-garde. Cartagena works with silver gelatin prints and uses analog collage techniques (cutting with scissors or knives, layering pieces by hand), which gives the pieces a tactile, handcrafted feel. The black-and-white tonal range harks back to mid-20th-century photography, imbuing the collages with a sense of archival memory. Within these frames, however, the traditional notions of portraiture and space are subverted. One collage might show a man’s silhouette filled in with fragments of architectural photographs, suggesting a human identity literally constituted by material possessions or surroundings. Another might replace a subject’s face with an object – a clock, a piece of machinery – punning on the idea of people becoming things. Repetition and typological strategies emerge as well: Cartagena often produces dozens of works in a series (the individual pieces here are titled We Are Things #1, #2, up to #100 and beyond), implying a catalog of modern identity tropes. This approach recalls the seriality of Bernd and Hilla Becher’s typologies, but applied to the collage of human identity – each piece a variation on the theme of self-construction. Despite the jarring combinations, there is an underlying coherence and empathy in Cartagena’s method. The careful composition of each collage, balancing visual elements, suggests that even in our disjointed self-presentations there is a pattern and purpose. Meanwhile, the fact that these source photographs were “expired” or abandoned adds a melancholic undercurrent: We Are Things is also about loss and the passage of personal histories. The images we create to define ourselves eventually outlive their purpose, becoming orphaned artifacts. Cartagena’s art gives these artifacts new life, inviting reflection on what they once meant and what they mean now in altered form.
Positioned within Cartagena’s body of work, We Are Things is a natural extension of the Photographic Structures project, yet it sharpens the focus onto the theme of self-image. If Photographic Structures deconstructed found photos to question the medium, We Are Things reconstructs them to question the modern self. This series also resonates with broader societal conversations in Mexico and beyond: in a world saturated with selfies and surveillance, how do images empower or imprison our sense of identity? Cartagena’s collages suggest that the line between empowerment and objectification is perilously thin. The series was first presented in 2020 and quickly garnered attention in contemporary art circles. It had a dedicated showing at the Salón ACME art fair in Mexico City (2020) , where its cutting-edge commentary on identity in Latin America was met with intrigue. Works from We Are Things have since been exhibited and placed through galleries in Mexico and internationally (with representation by Patricia Conde Gallery, Catherine Edelman Gallery, and others ). Notably, one of Cartagena’s We Are Things collages was featured in the Paris Photo New York 2020 online exhibition, singled out by critics as a “must-see” image that year . Such recognition speaks to the series’ compelling blend of visual allure and critical depth. In a museum or publication context, We Are Things reads as a scholarly yet accessible meditation on image culture. Its title encapsulates the sobering conclusion at which the work arrives: in our contemporary milieu, we are not only the creators and subjects of photographs – we have, in many ways, become the very photographs themselves. Cartagena’s series stands as a reflective mirror, one assembled from the broken pieces of others’ mirrors, urging us to reconsider how we see ourselves in the endless hall of images.

We are things

Since last year I have been feeding a network nothing but faces, each a fragment pulled from Mexico City’s discarded photographs of its inhabitants I've collected over the years. What came back was at once underwhelming and magnetic: half-formed visages that slip between presence and absence, as though the archive itself were reluctant to be reborn via these digital tools, but the photographic structure was still palpable in between these corrupt looking images. The failure cracked something open. If two centuries of photography have disciplined how we picture ourselves, what happens when a machine digests those trillions of exposures and regurgitates a face that never lived? Maybe, just maybe, in the blur between recognition and doubt, the GAN hints at another cartography of selfhood, a synthetic mirror where we might glimpse not who we are, but who the image, camera, algorithm, history, insists we could become. My first attempts at this project came in 2018-2020 where I manually dismembered faces from hundreds of images, in order to create new portraits. It feels like a creative déjà vu but with an enhanced pulse that only GANs can produce. Photography has an hegemonic hold on how we think we look. I am interested in seeing those structures and making them visible through these familiar yet strange portraits.

Photographic Structures (GAN)

Louise Alexander Gallery, in collaboration with Fellowship and Gallery FUMI, is pleased to present ALL BUT HUMAN, opening on 27 March at Gallery FUMI in Mayfair.
This exhibition explores the intersection of human creativity and artificial intelligence, showcasing two distinct yet interconnected creative processes: one rooted in material craftsmanship, the other emerging from AI and machine-generated art.
The exhibition features Roope Rainisto’s REWORLD series, which examines identity, perception, and possibility in an AI-driven era. Using AI-generated imagery, Rainisto explores alternative realities and the blurred boundaries between self and society, raising questions about individuality in a technology-driven world.
Alongside, Gallery FUMI presents handcrafted works by Charlotte Kingsnorth, Max Lamb, and Tuomas Markunpoika, highlighting the human touch, materiality, and imperfection. Their pieces challenge the boundaries between the organic and artificial, the handmade and industrial, permanence and ephemerality.
Together, these two perspectives form a dialogue about craft, technology, and creativity in contemporary art. Rather than opposing forces, AI and craft coexist, each expanding the possibilities for artistic expression and reshaping our understanding of authorship and artistic intention.
ALL BUT HUMAN invites reflection on how digital and physical creations interact and reframe the landscape of contemporary art.

ALL BUT HUMAN

The Hollywood Reporter Presents 'The Art of Oscar', AF Projects, Los Angeles
As The Hollywood Reporter unveils its annual Oscars issue, we are proud to present the second edition of The Art of Oscar, a groundbreaking portfolio commissioned by Los Angeles-based writer and curator Michael Slenske that reimagines the iconic golden statuette through the eyes of 13 artists residing between Los Angeles and New York. From conceptual explorations of Hollywood’s power dynamics to whimsical and provocative reinventions of the trophy itself, this year’s featured artists push the boundaries of what it means to celebrate cinematic excellence and in 2025. The works in this expansive portfolio will be on view during LA Art Week at AF Projects in Hollywood, running through March 21. The exhibition offers a rare opportunity for the public to experience these thought-provoking interpretations up close.
“What does it mean to celebrate Hollywood greatness in the year 2025?” asks artist Grant Levy-Lucero, whose Oscar takes the form of a tipsy ceramic decanter—an invitation to “take a big ole swig of the good stuff ” while contemplating the state of the industry.
<ReadMore>
Each artist brings their own personal history and multimedia process to the project: Kathryn Andrews, a central figure in LA’s Grief x Hope fire relief effort, presents a provocative poster—free for visitors to take—that challenges the patriarchy in Hollywood by honoring female Academy Award winners; Ken Gun Min, who worked for Lucasfilm in a previous life, paints an Oscar immersed in a fiery Los Angeles landscape, embellished with embroidery and crystals, a nod to both the beauty and chaos of the city at this moment; Austyn Weiner revisits a signature postcard project with a collection of risqué Oscar-themed notes that redefine the acceptance speech; Elliott Hundley constructs a towering 10-foot fringed Oscar totem that merges the festive with the mythological; Rob Pruitt assembles a shrine adorned with Oscars sourced entirely from eBay, transforming Hollywood nostalgia into a playful, curated experience; Drake Carr forges a mythological figure from an age-old Oscar ballet; Umar Rashid concocts a fever dream-infused narrative painting informed by pop culture and art history; Rogan Gregory pays tribute to “achievement in art forms portraying a society just past the golden age of its existence” with a clay totem that appears to be unearthed from an ancient civilization; Conrad Ruiz envisions the statuette as the alter ego of Los Angeles, the city and its cinematic soul have been scarred by fire in recent years, yet the statuette remains a symbol of resilience; Sachi Moskowitz reimagines Oscar through the lens of Nike of Samothrace, the Greek goddess of victory; and Ellen Jong crafts a striking sculptural ink fountain “Oscar’ella” as a tribute to the films that shaped her.
The Art of Oscar: 2025 continues to explore the intersection of contemporary art and Hollywood, elevating the conversation around cinema’s most coveted award. As these artists remind us, the Oscar is more than just a trophy—it is a reflection of ambition, desire, and the evolving narratives that define our culture.

<I>Installation images by Simon Cardoza Photography.</I>

The Art of Oscar

This summer, Louise Alexander Gallery is pleased to present 'Apple of Discord', a group exhibition bringing together over twenty established and emerging artists, each pushing the boundaries of traditional aesthetics to explore the complexities of beauty and form.
Opening on 5 July and on view until 8 September, new and unseen works will be presented for the first time with a showcase bridging the realms of photography, painting, sculpture, mixed media, and generative art, featuring a female strong artist line up including Rachel Maclean, Beth Frey, Cathrin Hoffmann, Oda Jaune, Guy Bourdin, Charlie Engman, and many more.
Drawing inspiration from René Magritte's seminal work 'The Treachery of Images', Apple of Discord invites viewers to look beyond the surface and engage in a visual conversation that defies the superficial. Like Magritte's famous pipe, the works assembled here defy initial impressions - a comb is not merely a tool, but a monument; a mannequin takes more than a bath, it evokes the Venus de Milo emerging both classical and incomplete, holding in her hand the apple of discord. Taking its name from this classical story - traditionally a symbol of coveted beauty that inevitably decays, the exhibition explores the deeper implications of our modern quest for affirmation beyond transient accolades.
In rejecting the confines of elitism and conservatism that often limit aesthetic appreciation, the exhibition playfully subverts established stereotypes of beauty. By engaging with the limits of form, dramatised and exaggerated bodily images strip objects of their functional identity, rendering the everyday into the surreal with nymph like stone sculptures, surrealist figures, and AI renders teasing out the elastic boundaries of taste and perception.

Apple of Discord

Relax… none of this is real.
Rachel Maclean is an acclaimed visual artist and avant-garde filmmaker. DUCK is her first exploration into deepfake. Starring Marilyn Monroe and Sean Connery, DUCK exists in a world of artifice, subterfuge and intrigue, referencing classic Hollywood, video games, film noir, and sci-fi to raise compelling questions about truth and power. This collection presents 20 short segments, each a reinterpretation of content from DUCK. 
<ReadMore>The thematic thread that runs through DUCK is one of socio-political conspiracy, namely, that surrounding JFK, Marilyn Monroe and UFOs. The fragmentation of the narrative into 20 distinct segments mirrors the conceptual idea inherent in conspiracy theories and conspiratorial theorising more generally - that of taking distinct pieces of information (some factual, some not so much) and synthesising them into a new ‘reality’ or myth. With DUCK Maclean pushes the tenets of postmodernism to an absurd conclusion, realities within realities with seemingly no epistemological foundation, indeed, as Sean Connery says in one scene “none of this makes sense”.
DUCK as presented here is a new expression of the film, fragments of the whole picture, that can be recombined and re-configured to create a new ‘reality’. Maclean’s films and artwork frequently take recognisable tropes from popular culture and the media as material to invert and subvert, challenging the ‘truth’ we are presented with through a patriarchal, heteronormative, capitalist-driven lens. DUCK is no exception, by resurrecting Marilyn Monroe as an indestructible self-aware AI, Maclean flips the script on the cult of masculinity, female sexuality cliches and gender power dynamics.

DUCK

Erica Mahinay: A Solo Exhibition at AF Projects During Frieze Los Angeles 2024
AF Projects is thrilled to announce a solo exhibition showcasing the works of Erica Mahinay, which will be held during Frieze Los Angeles from February 14 to March 31, 2024. This exhibition promises to immerse visitors in the artist's unique exploration of the intersection between painting and sculpture, highlighting her distinctive approach to materiality and abstraction.

The Art of Erica Mahinay
Erica Mahinay’s work navigates the boundary between painting and sculpture, creating a corporeal language that is both sinuous and sublime. Her abstract compositions dissolve into dense labyrinths of marks and textures, embodying an expressive, physical connection to the materials she uses. Known for her experimentation with diverse materials, Mahinay often paints on silk and other unconventional textiles such as parachute fabric. Her use of her hands to apply paint adds a deeply personal and tactile quality to her gestural abstractions, making her mark-making process an integral part of the viewer's experience.

Background and Artistic Journey
Born in 1986 in Santa Fe, Erica Mahinay pursued her artistic education at the Kansas City Art Institute, where she earned her BA, before going on to receive her MFA from the Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2013. Over the years, Mahinay has become well-known for her innovative use of materials and her ability to push the boundaries of painting. She has had solo exhibitions at prominent galleries including Lyles & King in New York, T293 in Rome, Ibid Gallery in Los Angeles, Jessica Silverman in San Francisco, and Loudhailer in Los Angeles.

Recent Recognition
Mahinay’s work continues to gain recognition in the art world. In 2023, she was featured in the prestigious Hammer Museum's Made in LA exhibition, part of the Los Angeles Biennial, Acts of Living. This recognition further solidifies her place as one of the prominent contemporary artists exploring abstraction, materiality, and the body in new and innovative ways.

Don’t miss the opportunity to experience Erica Mahinay’s latest works during Frieze Los Angeles at AF Projects.

Only Constant

Louise Alexander Gallery/AFP, in partnership with Fellowship, proudly presents an exhibition at Paris Photo 2023 that blends the realms of photography, video, and AI, pushing the boundaries of visual art. This showcase celebrates a collection of artists who have embraced the convergence of tradition and technological innovation to redefine contemporary art.

The exhibition features a powerful lineup of esteemed photographers whose work explores the transformative potential of AI in visual storytelling. Among the artists featured are:

Alkan Avcıoğlu, whose post-photography work uses AI to comment on the contemporary human experience.

Elman Mansimov, whose collection alignDRAW (2015) offers a glimpse into the transformative moment of AI art history, showcasing artworks created through text-to-image AI technology.

Joel Meyerowitz, presenting Sequels: One Image, Every Day, for a Decade, a pioneering exploration that merges six decades of his work into a decade-long visual narrative, with a new image released daily.

Laurie Simmons, whose In and Around the House II (2023) challenges our perceptions of AI and its role in art, using AI-driven image generators to expand the possibilities of visual creativity.

Roope Rainisto, who examines society's complexities with REWORLD (2023), a thought-provoking exploration of identities and cultural interplay through AI-generated imagery.

Simon Raion, with Pink. Unidentified. Such a Useless Color! (2023), a series of photographs that defy conventional roles and perceptions, presenting scenes that challenge societal expectations.

Yatreda, showcasing Strong Hair, Mosaic: ጠንካራ ፀጉር ሞዛይክ (2023), a tribute to African culture and its resilience through the art of hair, using 21 unique hairstyles to convey deep cultural and social messages.

Fellowship’s mission is to connect the past and the present in shaping the future of art, using blockchain technology to celebrate contemporary artists while embracing the transformative potential of artificial intelligence. Fellowship plays an instrumental role in ensuring that the legacy of exceptional artists continues to influence and inspire future generations.

Featured Works:
Elman Mansimov, alignDRAW (2015): A collection of AI-generated artworks, created from text prompts, that explore the intersection of technology and visual expression.

Joel Meyerowitz, Sequels: One Image, Every Day, for a Decade: This interactive project unites six decades of Meyerowitz’s photography into a decade-long visual experience, offering new insights into his evolving narrative.

Laurie Simmons, In and Around the House II (2023): A pioneering exploration of AI-driven image creation that challenges traditional boundaries and opens new possibilities for the future of art.

Roope Rainisto, REWORLD (2023): An AI-generated reflection on individual identities and cultural interplay, pushing the limits of art in a tech-centric world.

Simon Raion, Pink. Unidentified. Such a Useless Color! (2023): Provocative images that disrupt conventional ideas about societal roles and perceptions.

Yatreda, Strong Hair, Mosaic: ጠንካራ ፀጉር ሞዛይክ (2023): An exploration of African cultural heritage, celebrating the strength and resilience of African identity through the art of hair.

For more information about Fellowship and their participation at Paris Photo 2023, please visit:
https://fellowship.xyz/

About Fellowship
Fellowship is an innovative organization founded in 2021 by artists, collectors, and Web3 pioneers. Its mission is to connect the lineage of art’s rich history to contemporary practices, bridging traditional and digital realms. Through the use of blockchain technology, Fellowship ensures that both historic and contemporary works reach a new generation of collectors and art lovers, while also celebrating the transformative power of AI in the arts.

Fellowship’s efforts amplify both renowned and emerging voices in the art world, including iconic figures such as August Sander, Guy Bourdin, and Joel Meyerowitz, as well as contemporary talents like Yatreda, Roope Rainisto, and Simon Raion. Their commitment to showcasing the intersection of digital innovation and traditional art practices positions them as leaders in the future of visual arts.

Fellowship’s focus on the integration of AI, blockchain, and contemporary practices ensures that art remains a dynamic force in society, constantly evolving and inspiring.

Paris Photo 2023

Ardeshir Tabrizi’s solo exhibition The Golden Hands of Time marks a significant moment in Los Angeles’ vibrant art scene this fall. The exhibition showcases Tabrizi’s latest body of work, which features textile-based paintings that explore themes of cultural history, memory, and identity. Drawing from Persian heritage and weaving together symbolism, mythology, and personal narratives, Tabrizi creates intricate, visually compelling pieces that offer both a deeply personal and political reflection on the complexities of cultural heritage in an era shaped by globalization.

Tabrizi’s textile works combine embroidery, silkscreen, and painting to forge a hybrid artistic language that pays homage to art history—from the Renaissance to post-Warholian pop. These creations transcend time, bringing together ancient iconography and sacred imagery with a modern, exuberant color palette that challenges viewers to engage with the present moment. The tactile nature of his works breaks through the digital era’s obsession with the ready-made, conveying a profound beauty and emotionality.

The embroidered paintings become an intimate space where tradition and innovation merge, speaking to universal themes while remaining deeply rooted in Persian culture. By incorporating symbols and images important to diverse global audiences—ranging from Indian miniatures to family photographs—Tabrizi creates new, expanded meanings for sacred symbols. Through his innovative approach, including a new silkscreen technique, Tabrizi revisits religious iconography and gold leafing, further blending cultural elements with European painting traditions.

Tabrizi’s exploration of cultural dialogues and the power of art as both documentation and healing is central to his practice. His work addresses the intersection of cultural renewal and the historical understanding of heritage in contemporary society. Tabrizi’s deeply personal narrative emerges through the use of family photographs, creating a dialogue that resonates globally, transcending cultural specificity.

About Ardeshir Tabrizi
Born in Tehran, Iran in 1981, Ardeshir Tabrizi now lives and works in Los Angeles. His hand-embroidered textile pieces and multilayered narratives are renowned for their rich, thoughtful exploration of cultural heritage and the intersection of personal and collective histories. His works are housed in prominent collections such as the Fowler Museum at UCLA, Long Beach Museum of Art, The Bunker Artspace, and Espacio Tacuari. In 2024, Tabrizi will be an artist-in-residence at Kehinde Wiley's Black Rock residency in Senegal.

This exhibition runs through October 28, 2023, at AF Projects, located at 7503 Sunset Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA.

For more information, contact:
JB Bogulski
T. 213.479.2610
jb@afprojects.com

The Golden Hands of Time

REWORLD explores ideas around the concept of possibility. The artworks present events that could be possible, showing multiple alternative possibilities, happening at the same time, or the same event seen happening from multiple viewpoints.
REWORLD also looks at us functioning in society: how easy it is to lose your own identity and become someone else, to lose yourself in the crowd. Are we the same as everyone else? On some level, there is a natural desire to do so. To belong, to be part of a larger cause. To mean something to someone.

REWORLD

Some questions that are always at the forefront of my art practice: how do my images relate to the images that precede and surround them; what expectations are we bringing to images, and how are these expectations established and reinforced; what purpose do these expectations serve and how can we interact with these expectations?

AI image generators are a fascinating new tool for exploring these questions because they create images based upon a dataset of hundreds of millions of preexisting imagery but are otherwise unfettered by the preexisting expectations of visual culture. They make new images based on predictions from all the images (and image tags) that precede them. However, they are not otherwise bound by human logic or cultural codes and, therefore, make images that reflect these codes in surprising and often challenging ways, like a funhouse mirror. There is a beautiful collapse of category distinctions and a dynamic interplay between un-indoctrinated naivety and an appreciation of precedent. - Charlie Engman"

Funhouse Mirror

Ken Tisa: Celebrating an Artistic Legacy
Ken Tisa stands as one of the most important artists to emerge from New York City's downtown artistic community in the early 1970s. Known for his brilliant beaded textile wall hangings and incredible paintings, Tisa's work is renowned for its indefatigable attention to detail and has become historically significant—not just as a body of artwork, but in the profound influence it has had on a wide array of well-known artists and writers over the past six decades.

Early Life and Education
Born in 1945 in Philadelphia, PA, Ken Tisa moved to New York City as a teenager in the late 1960s to attend Pratt University (MFA, 1968). He later pursued further studies at the Yale School of Art and Architecture, where he received an MFA in 1971 under the guidance of Robert Ferris Thompson. Tisa gained recognition for his exuberantly colored and cartoon-like figurative paintings, associating with other young downtown artists such as Keith Haring.

The Evolution of Tisa’s Work
While at Yale, Tisa discovered beading, which would become a cornerstone of his artistic practice. His work expanded in the studio to include large-scale, intricately sewn wall hangings made of fabric, beads, and buttons. His fascination with Haitian beadwork was encouraged by a Fulbright grant, leading him to travel to Haiti. Additionally, a Yale grant took Tisa to New Orleans in 1970, where he collected thousands of glass beads during Mardi Gras. These beads became the primary material for his beaded pieces from 1970 onward.

Influence and Creative Collaborations
In the early 1970s, Tisa traveled to San Francisco to immerse himself in the psychedelic gay culture of the Cockettes. After returning to New York in 1973, he was included in the prestigious 1975 Whitney Biennial, where he exhibited two large beaded wall works. Tisa continued to collaborate with writers and performers, including Kenward Elmslie and Max Blagg. His collaborative project Hotel Firbank Archive with Blagg was presented at MoMA PS1 in 1980.

Focus on Teaching and Return to Exhibiting
In the mid-1980s, Tisa continued to create, exhibiting solo shows in New York, including a notable collaboration with David Hammonds. After participating in the 1989 exhibition Witnesses Against Our Vanishing at Artist’s Space—curated by David Wojnarovic and Nan Goldin—Tisa withdrew from exhibiting his new work during the AIDS epidemic. During this time, he focused on teaching at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, MD.

From 1999 to 2007, Tisa lived in France, collaborating with renowned ceramist Vincent Buffile. He returned to exhibiting his work in 2013, with his first solo show organized by former student Matthew Ronay. This exhibition included a range of Tisa’s ceramic works from 1999-2007, along with new paintings on canvas.

Recent Work and Continuing Influence
Ken Tisa's first exhibition of beaded works in four decades opened on March 15th at Kate Werble Gallery in New York City. Over the past 50 years, his works have been showcased in prestigious institutions such as the Philadelphia Museum of Art, La Salle University Art Museum, the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore College, The Philbrook Museum of Art, MoMA PS1, Artist’s Space, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Tisa's work continues to be celebrated for its profound influence on both the artistic community and cultural dialogues that span decades. His legacy as a pioneering force in the downtown New York art scene remains enduring, and his current exhibitions serve as a testament to his lasting impact.

The Color of Sound

Outside the limits of Los Angeles photographer John Divola introduces us to captivating standalone dwellings while leaving us to wonder who created them. In Isolated Houses, Divola shows us that the power of photography often isn’t in what is shown in the image, but what is withheld from view.
Beginning in the mid-1980s, Divola, a California native, set out on regular trips to the outer limits of LA and into the desert. It was there that he found and photographed small homes that suggest the presence of people who seek solitude.
Divola titles these pictures simply with their geographic coordinates, turning the images into both documents of his findings and a form land survey. Within this framework, he draws deeply from the old traditions of landscape photography in the American West. In Isolated Houses, rather than document the natural land, Divola provides evidence of those who have chosen to embrace remoteness in modern society.

Isolated Houses

Louise Alexander Gallery/AF Projects is proud to present Blue with Exceptions, an exhibition showcasing new works by John Divola from his ongoing George Air Force Base (GAFB) series.

Divola's photographs capture the abandoned housing area at the decommissioned George Air Force Base in Victorville, California, revealing scenes of decay and dereliction. Crumbling walls expose layers of paint and plaster, while Divola’s gestural interventions in the form of painted shapes introduce a surprising contrast. The work captures the tension between observing the specific decay of a place and the insistent presence of abstract art.

Enso: 36 Right-Handed Circumference Gestures
In this particular work, Divola reflects on the intersection of time, space, and his physical presence. The piece consists of 36 silver gelatin contact prints, each depicting an attempt to draw a circle with spray paint, traced by Divola’s right arm. The images were captured over a period of two months, from June 7th to August 12th, 2018, in different rooms of the abandoned housing area. The photographs act as a personal index—tracing both the place and time of creation, as well as Divola’s physical being in that space.

Divola draws inspiration from the 1995 film Smoke, in which Harvey Keitel's character, Auggie, photographs the same corner outside his shop every day. Although the photographs seem identical, Auggie insists they are all unique. This sentiment resonates in Divola's work, where each gesture, each circle, is a distinct moment and trace of the artist's presence.

Divola, born in Los Angeles in 1949, earned his MFA from UCLA in 1974, studying under renowned photographer Robert Heinecken. He has taught photography and art at various institutions, including California Institute of the Arts and, since 1988, at the University of California, Riverside.

Since 1975, Divola has had numerous solo exhibitions worldwide, including at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2013), Palm Springs Art Museum (2019), and Kunstverein Freiburg, Germany. His works are housed in prestigious collections such as the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Divola has received multiple awards, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship.

Blue with Exceptions

Ian Trout’s first solo exhibition at AF Projects delves into his ongoing exploration of how painting interacts with the omnipresence of graphic symbols in modern society.

Opening: September 10th, 6 to 8pm
Location: 7503 W Sunset Blvd, Los Angeles

Trout’s exhibition, Private Property, challenges the methods of social control that permeate modern life, particularly within the criminal justice system. The works question how images and symbols of authority—such as police cruisers or cardboard cutouts of officers—are used to maintain compliance and enforce social order. These images become tools in the maintenance of power, often more potent than the real, physical presence of authority itself.
In one of his key pieces, Motorcycle Police (Upside Down), Trout presents two paintings that feature the same enlarged stock image of a police motorcycle, turned upside down to offer a disorienting shift in perspective.
Additionally, Trout’s multi-panel works, The Washington Post, August 19, 2014 / The Punisher, Issue 13, 2019 and LawOfficer.com, July 7, 2016 / The Punisher, Issue 13, 2019, combine opinion pieces from police sources with panels from the 2019 comic book The Punisher. These works critique the use of the Punisher’s iconic skull logo by law enforcement, raising questions about the intersection of pop culture, violence, and authority.
Another piece, Driverless Car, is a found-footage work that revisits a viral video of the San Francisco police pulling over a driverless car, highlighting the clash between technology and law enforcement.
Trout (b. 1983) lives and works in Los Angeles. He earned his MFA from Claremont Graduate University in 2011 and has recently exhibited at there-there in Los Angeles.

Private Property

In Bourdin’s photographs we find playgrounds for the eye to explore. Bursts of highly saturated color and playful compositional arrangements went firmly against the grain of the work produced by his contemporaries.
While the principal goal of the fashion photographer was to make their subject matter appear beautiful and elegant, Bourdin sought to make the photographs themselves fashionable, and to create a type of image that held its own modicum of desire to have, to own, and to show off. 
Bourdin’s practice was one that made up its own rules while exploring the arenas of Surrealism, theatricality, absurdism, and sublimity. To the extent that a photographer’s job is to show viewers interpretations of the world, Bourdin’s pictures crafted worlds in which there was no such thing as ordinary, and that all visions were cloaked in alluring and provocative imagery. The genius that is stamped upon the legacy of Guy Bourdin is found in his inventiveness, enthusiasm, and fearlessness, qualities that define great art, great fashion, and great eroticism in equal measures.

Portfolio #1, 2022

Family Album
(in memory of Krystyna Krzywicka)

Exploring family albums through the lens of memory loss, this project is derived from my personal photography archive spanning the 1960s to the 1980s. Later in life, my mother experienced dementia, and her ensuing memory loss forms the heart of this work—my interpretation of how she perceived reality, often reliving her childhood. In this narrative, generations blend as her children’s memories intertwine with her own, allowing past and present to collapse into one.

Building on themes from my previous series, UnBeautiful, which challenged the pervasive misrepresentation of women's bodies in AI-generated imagery by embracing imperfections and questioning a narrow, male-dominated perspective, Family Album reclaims personal history. Both projects invite viewers to reconsider established narratives—whether by reinterpreting body imagery or by exploring the fragile, intertwined nature of memory and identity.

This project is a reconstruction of a past that exists somewhere between reality and imagination. It began with scanning dozens of old negatives that my grandfather shot in the 1960s and 1970s on Soviet cameras like the Zenit—many of which were never printed. I took hold of them after he passed away, as my family was cleaning his apartment, and uncovered a forgotten archive of everyday life: my grandmother with her two children (my mother and my aunt), vacations, skiing trips, quiet moments at home, and cityscapes of Vilnius, Riga, Zakopane, Nida, and Trakai. Alongside these, I used video recordings from his Japanese Jelco Zoom 8mm camera as additional training material, creating a dataset that became the foundation for this work.

In a way, this archive is not just a record of family life but also a recording of my grandmother’s memories—of her, through her, and around her. She was always present, either as a subject or a witness, living through each of these moments. But in the last decade of her life, after a car accident, she suffered from memory loss—most likely linked to dementia or Alzheimer’s. She no longer recognized us, mistook my mother for her sister, and lived in a version of the past that only she could see. I was both heartbroken and fascinated by the world she inhabited.

Now, through AI, I have reinterpreted this archive. I trained several Stable Diffusion models in Python using the DreamBooth framework, allowing AI to transform these images and videos into new iterations of memory. The results are strangely familiar—faces that resemble my family members but are never exact, moments that feel real but remain just beyond recognition.

AI is the perfect medium for this project. Its generative glitches—the fluid, shifting morphs and unreal distortions—serve as an approximation of fractured perception, mirroring the way memory erodes and reshapes itself over time. I find beauty in these imperfections, in the way AI hallucinates people and places that almost exist but never fully do. These digital artifacts echo the way my grandmother’s mind reassembled her past, creating a world that felt real to her but was built from fragmented recollections.

This project is a homage to her and her memories—both those that remained and those that faded. It explores how AI, like memory, distorts and reconstructs the past, offering glimpses into a world that is deeply personal yet ultimately unknowable.

Family Album, My Grandmother’s Memories

Peter Shire is a Los Angeles-based artist whose work defies easy categorization. A master of ceramics, furniture design, toys, interior design, and public sculpture, Shire’s creations reference and parody movements such as Bauhaus, Futurism, Art Nouveau, and Art Deco. His subversive humor and playful approach to art made him a natural fit for the groundbreaking Milan-based Memphis design group, where he was a founding member.

Shire’s works blur boundaries, merging traditional art forms with everyday objects and designs, which has helped establish him as a unique voice in contemporary art and design. His influence can be seen across a range of media, from whimsical ceramics to functional art pieces, each embodying a sense of irony and innovation.

A graduate of the renowned Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles, Shire’s impressive exhibition record includes numerous solo and group shows in Los Angeles, Milan, Paris, Tokyo, and Sapporo. His works are part of public collections and museums around the world. Shire is represented by Kayne Griffin Corcoran.

Born in Los Angeles’ Echo Park neighborhood, where he still resides today, Shire’s connection to the city’s vibrant and diverse cultural landscape is central to his identity. He credits his family’s influence, particularly his father’s focus on craftsmanship through his furniture design and manufacturing business, as crucial to his artistic development.

Shire’s refusal to be confined to one artistic category underscores his belief in an aesthetic dialogue that transcends traditional norms. As he put it, “The art world likes to categorize artists. When I think about my position in the art world, I realize it is extremely mobile because I include and cross over so many boundaries.”

Rejecting labels and embracing a broad creative practice, Shire is unafraid to challenge the status quo of both art and design. He notes, “If Leonardo were alive today he would probably be working at Cape Canaveral,” reflecting his view that true innovation happens when boundaries are pushed, and traditional categories are disregarded.

While Shire’s work pays homage to the rich history of twentieth-century art, it also breaks from linear trajectories, replacing nostalgia with playful exploration and subtle irony. His bold reimagining of visual language—where form and surface, technology and aesthetics collide—has established him as one of the key figures in postmodern critical discourse.

Just ask around

Josue Thomas: Art, Activism & The Power of Collaboration
Creating Beauty in a Time of Urgency
Los Angeles-based artist and designer Josue Thomas uses his work as a visual and cultural force, blending collage, photography, text-based polemics, and abstraction to reflect the urgencies of our political present. His posters and graphics, seen throughout Los Angeles and beyond during recent protests, have become emblems of resistance, representation, and racial equality. For Thomas, art must be rooted in purpose, insisting that beauty emerges only when set against the backdrop of real-world struggles.

From Hollywood to Gallery Dept.: A Space for Creativity
Born in Hollywood, California, in 1984, Thomas was immersed in art from an early age, influenced by his artist parents. His creative journey led him to open a multidisciplinary studio space in downtown LA, later expanding into Gallery Dept., a hybrid studio, brand, and experimental art laboratory.

Thomas’ mantra—“Collaborate, Create, Rebel”—guides his practice. His studio became a gathering space for painters, musicians, designers, and thinkers, fostering an organic exchange of ideas across disciplines.

Gallery Dept.: Where Art Meets Activism
Founded in 2017, Gallery Dept. evolved into a boundary-pushing platform in 2020, embodying Thomas’ belief in transparency, artistic process, and cultural messaging. His text-based works, such as:
ART THAT KILLS
STOP BEING RACIST
YOU ARE LATE!
RECYCLE Limited Editions

…have cemented his reputation as an artist unafraid to challenge and disrupt.

A Philosophy of Freedom & Exploration
Thomas' approach to art is about discovery and defying convention. He describes it as a journey where curiosity leads to unexpected paths, elevating human experience through inspiration and compassion:

You have a destination. On your route, curiosity pays you a visit. It behooves you to explore alternate roads... Navigating life with the utmost freedom, conceiving an abundance of beauty... To be certain of your destination means you will always be at the right place at the right time." – Josue Thomas"

Alejandro Cartagena

Ground Rules

Recent & Upcoming

Marco Tirelli

Rick Lowe

Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst

Elman Mansimov

Alejandro Cartagena

Arik Levy

Trevor Paglen

Eko33 - JeanJacques Duclaux

Artists

Louise Alexander Gallery is Contemporary art gallery based in Porto Cervo, Italy and Los Angeles, USA.

Sardinia

Los Angeles