Alejandro Almanza Pereda makes sculpture, installation, and photography that leans on the relationship between precarity and solidity. His attention to the life forces in objects and material allows for allegorical understandings of the tentative balances perceived as resolute in contemporary social orders. His work typically focuses on the invisible power and influence that architecture imposes on everyday life. Pushing against modernist architects’ utopic ideals and outsized egos, he champions a life outside of architecture and social design.

His practice primarily is an exploration and play of gravity, material, tension, and humor. Everyday objects are at the core of the practice, manipulating their physical, metaphorical, and functional paradigmsconcurrently. The object arrangements and meaning-making recall Dutch Vanitas paintings, flea market collections, and amateur construction. His arrangements’ symbolic meanings remind viewers of the transience of life, the futility of pleasure, and the certainty of death, all with a wink of physical humor as an entry point into the work.

Resisting documentation of his larger installations, Almanza’s photographs result from an ongoing search for a different set of gravitational laws. This refusal of a singular reality led Almanza to build an underwater studio, creating a different reality with new dimensions and behaviors. The underwater photography tank allowed for object relations different from our everyday life and outside our typical realm of physics.