Visiting artist Sebastian Alvarez will be speaking about his exhibition in the McCarthy Art Gallery, “The Completion Office” following his gallery reception. The talk is in Saint Edmund’s Hall 104 from 5-6PM.
Biography: Sebastian Alvarez is an interdisciplinary artist and filmmaker born in Lima, Peru, and currently based in Abruzzo, Italy. There, he has participated in and co-facilitated community-based projects involving longtime residents and newcomers. These experiences have increasingly shaped a practice concerned with the interrelations and ruptures between living systems, built environments, institutions, and collective life. His research-based work takes the form of film, installation, infographics, performative lectures, sound, and experimental music. He produced and co-wrote the award-winning documentary A Machine to Live In, which examines the relationship between state power, architecture, mysticism, and utopian community-making in Brazil, and is currently developing a hybrid documentary in the Peruvian Andes on extractivism and its social and environmental consequences within the global economy. Alvarez has taught and lectured at the San Francisco Art Institute and facilitated workshops and performances at San Quentin State Prison. He holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His work has been presented across museums, galleries, public spaces, cultural institutions, and international film festivals, including Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Hyde Park Art Center, the Chicago Cultural Center, Townhouse Gallery, the École Nationale Supérieure d’Art Bourges, and Wiener Festwochen.