Fried Fruit Art Space is pleased to present a solo exhibition by artist alejandro t. acierto. He produces creative projects, exhibitions, and performances that highlight the impact of colonial legacies across technologies, material culture, and the environment. Often taking shape within and across expanded forms of documentary, new media, creative scholarship, and sound, his works have been shown internationally at the Havana Biennial in Matanzas, Cuba, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco), ISSUE (NYC), Radialsystem (Berlin), and MCA Chicago, among others. He has also published works with Hyperallergic, Parse Journal, Dilettante Army, Media-N Journal, and Resonance: The Journal of Sound and Culture.
He was Artist in Residence for Critical Race Studies at Michigan State University, a Core Faculty Teaching Fellow at Warren Wilson College in the MA for Critical Craft Studies, and a Digital Humanities Faculty Fellow at Vanderbilt University. He was also a Center for Craft Archive Research Fellow and an Ansel Adams Research Fellow at the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona. acierto is an Assistant Professor of Digital Arts at Wayne State University located in Waawiyaataanong on the ceded lands of the Three Fires Confederacy, including the Ojibwe, Odawa, Potawatomi, and Wyandot peoples.
The works in this exhibition emerge from an ongoing inquiry into landscape, displacement, and adaptation. Following the steady rise of rapid urban growth across Phoenix Arizona’s metropolitan areas in the last several decades, the region’s vastly diverse natural habitats have increasingly been replaced by sprawling housing developments, expansive commercial warehousing facilities, and enormous tech campuses for international manufacturing and distribution. Leaving an indelible mark upon the fragile ecosystem of the Sonoran Desert alongside the longstanding effects of climate change in the region, the area’s natural wildlife has seen significant shifts that have altered their capacity to thrive amidst dwindling natural resources.
Simultaneously, residents across the city’s urban desert landscape have faced devastatingly harmful temperatures, an increasingly dangerous water crisis, and a significant shortage of affordable housing that makes living there particularly precarious, especially those facing housing insecurity. Noting these tensions, this body of work navigates how the conditions of a constantly shifting landscape anticipate more complicated stories of relation between humans, non-humans, and the environments they inhabit.
He was Artist in Residence for Critical Race Studies at Michigan State University, a Core Faculty Teaching Fellow at Warren Wilson College in the MA for Critical Craft Studies, and a Digital Humanities Faculty Fellow at Vanderbilt University. He was also a Center for Craft Archive Research Fellow and an Ansel Adams Research Fellow at the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona. acierto is an Assistant Professor of Digital Arts at Wayne State University located in Waawiyaataanong on the ceded lands of the Three Fires Confederacy, including the Ojibwe, Odawa, Potawatomi, and Wyandot peoples.
The works in this exhibition emerge from an ongoing inquiry into landscape, displacement, and adaptation. Following the steady rise of rapid urban growth across Phoenix Arizona’s metropolitan areas in the last several decades, the region’s vastly diverse natural habitats have increasingly been replaced by sprawling housing developments, expansive commercial warehousing facilities, and enormous tech campuses for international manufacturing and distribution. Leaving an indelible mark upon the fragile ecosystem of the Sonoran Desert alongside the longstanding effects of climate change in the region, the area’s natural wildlife has seen significant shifts that have altered their capacity to thrive amidst dwindling natural resources.
Simultaneously, residents across the city’s urban desert landscape have faced devastatingly harmful temperatures, an increasingly dangerous water crisis, and a significant shortage of affordable housing that makes living there particularly precarious, especially those facing housing insecurity. Noting these tensions, this body of work navigates how the conditions of a constantly shifting landscape anticipate more complicated stories of relation between humans, non-humans, and the environments they inhabit.
Photos by James Farley