OPENING RECEPTION: Tres – Garden of Memories, Lexicon de Plantas, & Water State by Alejandra Abad
January 17, 2025 @ 6:00 pm – 9:00 pm
This exhibition, opening Friday, January 17th, 2024 presents TRES, an interactive exhibition presented and crafted by Alejandra Abad.
Alejandra Abad’s themes relate to her own memories and belonging by exploring her relationship to space and the moving image; indoor and outdoor projections express cyclical change and transformation. She works in a Magical Realist style that recontextualizes the extraordinary moments of the everyday in reimagined environments, most recently in experimental animations that depict various topics regarding the audience’s memories of connecting to community and nature in South Florida.
This sequence of projects began in the Fall of 2023 through partnerships with various cities and art spaces, beginning with transforming hand-drawn memories by recomposing constituent elements into new forms that mirror the cyclical processes of nature; i.e., the natural world transforms into drawings, and then the drawings transform into animations and those into hanging sculptures and layering of materials and textures.
This exhibition at the Coral Springs Museum of Art presents the trajectory of the projects that began in the Fall of 2023: Garden of Memories, Lexicon de Plantas, and Water State.
Concept
Garden of Memories (2023) mixes various materials to create drawings and cut-outs to assemble animations of memories relating to Alejandra’s grandfather’s garden in Venezuela. Throughout her residency at Bailey Contemporary Arts she invited people to share their own stories related to plants by scanning a QR code. The stories formed the basis of various playful indoor and outdoor interpretations and activations of the installation (outdoor projections, claymation, paper cut-outs, collages, etc.).
Lexicon de Plantas (2024) is a large-scale audiovisual and site-specific art installation featuring a typewritten poem by her grandfather, and drawings and animations of memories of plants from the artist and the community that were then projected onto paper sculptures. The community-sourced texts came from members of the public who visited the exhibition in the months of February through May of 2024. The installation included an interpretation of a poem type written in Caracas in 1949 by Jose Colmenares, Alejandra’s Venezuelan grandfather, who was an educator and an advocate for nature. She combined text and animation using hand-drawn elements and laser-cut objects; the work incorporated the physical manifestation of the original typewritten poem through the text. This was displayed as part of a triptych alongside iterations of animated motifs based on her childhood memories of her grandfather’s garden.
Water State (2024-2025) is an ongoing experimental animation that began development with the Artist Support Regional Grant from the Cultural Division and a unique one-time screening occurred at the terrace of the Pompano Beach Cultural center sunset as an homage to artist Allan Kaprow. She experiments with the fluid nature of water in collages, animation, and cut outs that weave together audiovisual memories from the community that depicts Broward County as a refuge.
About Alejandra Abad:
Born in Caracas, Venezuela, Alejandra Abad is an interdisciplinary visual artist and educator whose playful storytelling features fragmentation, folklore, and mythology. She uses a blend of analog and digital processes to explore belonging and agency by inviting the audience to experience reimagined environments via layering, abstraction, and light. Her style is informed by architectural studies at Florida Atlantic University, Film/Video/New Media/Animation at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and Interdisciplinary Media Art Practices at The University of Colorado.
https://alejandraabad.com/
