February Artist of the Month:
Gabriela Alva Cal y Mayor

Brooklyn-based artist Gabriela Alva Cal y Mayor (b. 1978, Mexico City) has exhibited in New York City and Mexico City.  Her work is simultaneously playful and socially aware as she focuses on two of her favorite things: objects and words.

Alva Cal y Mayor responds to the world around her, and incorporates flavors from the cities that she has lived in throughout her life.  This is particularly true in the series “Your life or your purse?”, in which she works with multi-colored Mexican grocery bags.  She turns the bags into cultural conflagrations of capitalist desires by adding images of unattainable objects such as bags and shoes.

Alvas Cal y Mayor's love of objects is exemplified in her “99 Cents Store” series in which she unites plastic army men, clothespins, and other objects in streamline sculptures.  This mentality of utilizing everyday objects has continued to influence her work.  She explains that useless, made of a roll tape, aims to “synthesize that frustrating feeling of cheapness, ripping and breaking making it impossible to get a full piece”.  Alva Cal y Mayor engages her viewers with mundane ideas by inviting them to take a closer look.

Alva Cal y Mayor is a 2003 graduate of the Universidad Iberoamericana, Mexico City, and the School of Visual Arts, New York City.  Recently Alva Cal y Mayor participated in the Artist in the Marketplace Program at the Bronx Museum, and has exhibited at Winkleman Gallery and Chashama. 

Artist Statement

What is your favorite color? What is your favorite ice cream flavor? What is your favorite type of music? Transcendental and complex questions like that are constantly being asked through all our existence.

Favorite, two of my favorite things are objects and words. Objects; as a material thing, objects of content, object as a purpose. An object is something more immediate, what works for me might not work for you. Words and objects travel so far depending on how well we know how to use them, if we don’t know the meaning or the purpose, if we don’t have a dictionary or have the instructions we generally put them aside. Whereas I like to take those words, phrases, and sentences and turn them around, ask and wonder why do we use them as much? Sometimes while reading a book a word jumps and then I can’t go further because an instant visual image appears in my mind, in that same way while I see an object or while using one, I come up with another way to utilize it and that is when I start developing it until I can’t think of anything else.

I have always enjoyed how things look through different levels of focus, through a microscope, through a colored filter, even not having a 20/20 vision is a tool for me, when I see things from far I always think it is something else, until I come closely. Finding what I saw at a first glance sometimes seems more interesting or more fun than what it really is. It is through translation both as meaning and in shape and appearance that I find myself constantly working.

Gabriela Alva Cal y Mayor