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Angel Alvarado: Geovani’s Room
September 18, 2019 12:00 pm - September 20, 2019 8:00 pm
Organized in collaboration with curator and researcher Javier Arellano Vences from the Vincent Price Art Museum, Human Resources Los Angeles is pleased to present Angel Alvarado: Geovani’s Room, the artist’s first solo exhibition. The exhibition features photographs, a single-channel video, and an immersive installation as well as a closing reception performance by Alyss Glass.
Alvarado’s work investigates the commodification of queer visibility and the dissemination of a canon that situates white cisgender men at the pinnacle of queer sensuality and sexuality, while concurrently commenting on issues specific to brown queerness. Through image appropriation, manipulation, performance, and the insertion of brown bodies, Alvarado sabotages constructed realities that are fixated on a homogenized queer experience, ultimately renouncing conditioned aspirations that often lead to a negative body image and body dysmorphia.
Alyss Glass’s newly commissioned performance, Geovani’s Room, provides a reflection onbrown queer melancholy. A melancholy that stems from navigating internal violence within personal relationships as in James Baldwin’s novel, Giovanni’s Room, and the enduring of external efforts by an array of people and groups to shape gender performativity and gender identity. The fragility of these rigid structures can be seen and heard through the slowed down phonetic reading of the artist’s name, Alyss Glass, “all is glass,” a gesture towards the imminent shattering of these fallacious mechanisms.
Angel Alvarado is a Los Angeles-based artist whose practice revolves around the conception of the brown body within queer politics. Through a multivalent artistic practice, he looks to question notions of gender, sexuality, and agency through bodies that are perceived as marginalized. He received his BFA in Fine Art at the University of California, Los Angeles in 2015.
Javier Arellano Vences has served as the Vincent Price Art Museum’s (VPAM) Curatorial and Research Assistant since 2017. He has contributed and assisted in developing over 15 exhibitions at VPAM, among them, A Decolonial Atlas: Strategies in Contemporary Art of The Americas (2017), Laura Aguilar: Show and Tell (2017) as part of the Getty Foundation’s Pacific Standard Time initiative: Los Angeles/Latin America, and Regeneración: Three Generations of Revolutionary Ideology (2018). He also serves as VPAM’s primary English to Spanish translator for exhibitions and publications and provides translation services to other art institutions. Vences holds a BA in Art History from the University of California, Los Angeles, and his research centers around the hybridization of U.S. Latinx avant-garde art, vernacular art, and anarchism.
Exhibition Credits
Angel Alvarado: Geovani’s Room is a collaborative exhibition organized by Javier Arellano Vences and Angel Alvarado. Poster design by Giancarlos Campos. This exhibition is made possible thanks to Human Resources Los Angeles, and Vardui Sharapkhanyan.
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Image Credit: Angel Alvarado, a touch of the neck, 2019. Inkjet Print. Courtesy of the artist.