Alexandra Gelis
Alexandra Gelis is a Colombian-Venezuelan, visual artist based in Toronto, Canada. She holds an MFA degree from York University, Toronto, Canada. Her work incorporates photography, video, electronics and digital processes, informed by her formal education in Visual Arts. Gelis’ work addresses the use of image relation to topics of displacement, landscape, and politics. One of the prevalent concerns in her work is to unveil the relationship between landscape, history, people, geopolitics and the diverse techniques for achieving subjugation of bodies and population. In her current research, Gelis emphasizes the role of the artist as multidisciplinary inquirer who explores diverse methodologies in fieldwork. She has expanded her practice by using electronics and programming for interactivity.
Borders. Is an intimate photographic exploration of the bodies belonging to six queer individuals. This animation, made up of hundreds of high-resolution photographs, unabashedly examines the evidence of physical change and transformation: surgery scars, tattoos, and other traces. “Borders”, six lgbtq2s people are portrayed naked as they share their meditations, stories and experiences of being women. “Borders” is a journey through the evidence of their transformations where bodily scars and tattoos reveal the body as a site of resistance.
Raspaos. It was very hot in Cartagena, Colombia, as a child I will buy an ice cone and I will eat it lying down on the beautiful decorated and cold tile floor in my house. The installation is a product of a private performance in the back of my house in Toronto, dealing with childhood memories. I paint on the snow using fuchsia ink (reminiscences of Ice Cone or “Raspaos”) tiles with arabesques as in the floor in my house in Cartagena. At the end I laid down naked on the snow trying to recuperate these impossible memories.
English for Beginners. An experimental work dealing with dislocation, fragmentation lost of contact and the regaining of foreign speech in a foreign land. The work articulates the difficult and comic experience of learning a new language.
Exhibition at Toronto Art Hotel-The Gladstone, 1313 Gallery and Lennox Contemporary Gallery - Toronto, Canada; in the framework of aluCine Festival.
