Artist Post: Alejandro Duran

Alejandro Duran went to Tufts University, graduating with a major in Education and a minor in Literature. He was born in Mexico but spent the majority of his life in New York. His work includes Photography, installation and video. His latest work on display is located at Hunter’s East Harlem Art Gallery. His work is called “Washed Up: Transforming a Trashed Landscape”. Duran works mainly with Man and Nature and recently on how the negative effects of our pollution has carried through to the natural world around us. His images of trash which include; water bottles, old plastics, bottle caps, couch foam, flip flops, toothbrushes…etc. 

Alejandro’s work makes beauty out of something terrible. He places these old, broken, bent objects that are all relatively the same color and places them strategically around an around of nature to make it look like it belongs. This type of work makes a great impact because as the world has become more lazy it has simultaneously become more polluted. We have stopped caring about the environment and what our trash does to the ecosystems and Alejandro shows that effect. He has collected the trash from shores from over fifty nations of six continents. He carefully places his objects around Mexico’s largest federally protected reserve, Sian Ka’an. Duran wanted his pieces to mirror our current reality. He wanted to show how bad our impact is, even in places that aren’t creating the waste. Duran states, “ The resulting photo series depicts a new form of colonization by consumerism, where even undeveloped land is not safe from the far-reaching impact of our disposable culture.”

Duran uses similar colors in his pieces, blending the trash he places in the environment, and the environment himself. Some of the images it takes you a second to realize that it’s not just some random pretty natural object, but trash that has been made into beauty. He hides plastics throughout his work to blend it in with the nature, giving his photographs a cohesive feel. I like Duran’s work and his impact on society because in some ways it is a slap to the face. Showing the world what it has done to the natural beauty around us and showing us how our wasteful habits are negatively impacting everyone, not just developed areas. 

Link to his website: 

http://www.alejandroduran.com

Getting Lost

Identify Yourself Article Review

This article has a lot of good points for the pros and cons of the internet. I think I have found that I feel impartial to the good or bad side because of my ability of self control. As a human I have the ability to log off or choose to interact with people in person, therefore I don't find it that big of a deal that we use the internet so much and that it has taken over. one thing I found particularly interesting and true is that the internet and technology in general has made us impatient. I think that the instant communication, instant answer, instant gratification is tainting society and making people expect things at a faster pace. Food taking too long at a restaurant, downloads on your computer taking forever…. so on and so forth. I think something else that has happened is the internet has made us lazy. Yes it is great that if you where wondering what the weather was going to be like tomorrow you can just check an app, but you can also check a different app to see the specific clothes you should wear for that type of weather. Now as amusing as that sounds it is also a little absurd that the internet is picking out clothes for us, it is computing according to the temperature estimated whether we should wear shorts or pants, a dress or a jacket. Another way I think the internet is hurting our society and our younger generations is that this laziness and creating stupidity. Instead of thinking through your long list of vocabulary you already know in your head or looking through the dictionary, kids just go to the thesaurus on dictionary.com and can find plenty of synonyms for whatever word they couldn't seem to remember. While I know there's a vast majority of information on the internet about current news and scientific sources to help with projects and keeping up with the times I think that their should be a limit to the amount of use. I remember being in lower school and having our teachers give us only a certain amount of time on the computers to let us research for our papers and then we would find our one online source and head to the library to collect our three or four book sources. It denied us the ability to be lazy and have the computer autocorrect our papers and find our flaws in our research and instead we had to do the work ourselves. I love how the internet has sped things up, but I think taking pride in your work is something that should come back into style.