Breathing Room
1224 W Loyola Ave, Chicago IL
April 8, 2017 - April 27, 2017
This collection of work seeks to visualize the seemingly immaterial and proposes the breath as a material of becoming. As part of a larger body of work that emerges from the recurrence of historically marginalized bodies stripped of their agency to speak, I am offering the breath, the seemingly silent gesture of resilient presence, as a site of agency, reclamation, and power in the context of historic oppression and disempowerment. For this work, I am offering these pieces as aesthetic strategies that provide a different, alternative stage from which these voices may become present.
—Alejandro T. Acierto
Alejandro T. Acierto is an artist and musician whose work is largely informed by the breath, the voice, and the processes that enable them. He has exhibited artworks at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, Issue Project Room, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Art Institute of Chicago, Hume Gallery, Corner, Mission Projects, Salisbury University, SOMArts, and presented performance works at Rapid Pulse, the Brooklyn International Performance Art Festival, Center for Performance Research, Experimental Sound Studio, and Center for New Music and Technology. Acierto has also held residencies at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Banff Centre, High Concept Laboratories, Chicago Artists' Coalition and was a recent FT/FN/FG Consortium Fellow and a Center Program Artist at the Hyde Park Art Center. He received his undergraduate degree from DePaul University, an MM from Manhattan School of Music, an MFA in New Media Arts from University Illinois at Chicago, and is currently on faculty at UIC. For more information, please visit alejandroacierto.com.
Breathing Room Exhibition Guide (PDF)
Artist Talk – January 20, 2021