Alejandra Laviada

Alejandra Laviada was born in Mexico City in 1980. She began her career in painting, graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2003. She recently received her MFA in photography from the School of Visual Arts in New York. Alejandra’s photographs have been exhibited in Mexico and in the U.S, and published in the New York Times Magazine, American Photo, Creative Review and Revista Celeste, among others. She was awarded honorable mention in the XII Photography Biennial in Mexico, and was recipient of the 2006 Golden Light Award in the Personal Work category. Most recently, Alejandra was selected to participate in PEEK2007, organized by Art+Comerce.

Alejandra’s work explores the shifting relationship between photography and sculpture, whereby ordinary objects are striped of their traditional function and perceived differently. Each of the sites Alejandra photographs becomes a temporary studio that she documents and intervenes. Mexico City is her subject and inspiration. Every project is an attempt to record pieces of history that are simultaneously being erased and created, and reflect a city struggling to reconcile past and future histories. New buildings grow old very fast and old buildings are left abandoned, modern ruins replace old ones and stand as empty monuments of progress. Alejandra wants to capture this ‘in-between’ stage of things; that fleeting moment when the past and present collide and what once was, now fades away in its ruins.