Mauricio Alejo

Mauricio Alejo is a Mexican artist based in Mexico City. He earned his Master of Art from New York University in 2002 as a Fulbright Grant recipient, and was a resident artist at NUS Centre for the Arts in Singapore in 2007. His work is held in collections including the Daros Latinoamérica Collection in Zürich, and has been exhibited at CCA Wattis Institute of Contemporary Arts, Museo Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, and The 8th Havana Biennial. Alejo's practice transforms everyday objects into quietly subversive photographs that suspend familiar things in states of precarious balance. "Instead of finding my ideas in the world around me, I find them in my head," he explains. "They literally pop up; then I pick them by how simple and transformative they are." His images liberate objects from their intended purpose: "I hope to bring the items into a new narrative which doesn't obey their functionality." Central to his philosophy is a questioning of photography's relationship to time and meaning. "I think that narrative is to photography what figurative is to painting: not its best feature at all," Alejo argues. "What photography does at its best is present things suspended from the continuum of time." There is also something darker beneath the playful surfaces: "At the core, I'm a nihilist. A lot of my photographs portray that happy moment where things seem to be in balance and the illusion gets perpetuated by means of photographic stillness."