Alejandra González Soca

Born in 1973 in Maldonado, Uruguay
Lives and works in Montevideo, Uruguay

The work of Alejandra González Soca appears as the result of a tension between the uniqueness an unrepeatability of an ephemeral gesture and the apparent dispersion of the multiplied object, materialized in a polyphonic integration of elements and registers. In this respect, the artist chooses to permanently play on the edge of an oxymoron that evidences the slight cracks through which we cab peek into the cultural contradictions arising from the juxtaposition of dyads like “clean an d dirty”, “hidden and exposed”, “own and alien”, “beautiful and horrible”, all socially assumed as immutable. Far from contradiction herself, an overview of her work of recent years (focused in the intervention/interaction of specific bodies and spaces) is projected as the spiral of an on-going process that grows and evolves without losing its original form. The plastic, material, and visual avatars are born from a common place: the practice, of a forgotten ritual. The radical and subversive condition o delving into the fragments of social an personal realities re-signifies ceremonial pieces (a dress, a mask, a totem) or reinvest them with values lost in the path of social construction. The mutation present in the living matter latent in her interventions (particularity in those “gardens of Adonis” of altered topographies) remit to the forgotten primitive an sacred gesture, and as such, it captures all our senses with its compound symbolism, where reason and logic become insufficient decoders involving other, more affective or subconscious, spaces of connection. In her exploration of the temporality and finiteness of the pieces, the artist combines her status as creator and preserver of memory, in the Benjaminian sense of association between the unfinished past, which does not fit in the construction of historical knowledge, with a primitive past, the continent of a memory relegated to the collective unconscious. In her constant overlapping of diffuse layers. AGS´ work functions as a rescue operation of the primordial objects (of the traces left by them) revealing in that demiurge act of compilation that landscape of her particular but shared Wonderland.

Verónica Panella, Panorama del Arte contemporáneo en Uruguay, 2016.

Selected Exhibition

Solo Exhibitions
2016-Fragments of a small world – Roman Ruins S. Cucufate, Vila de Frades, Portugal.
2015-The (in) visible Legacy: becomings of hypomnema – Historical Museum Cabildo, Montevideo, Uruguay.
2015-Intimate-Cultural Center Simón Bolívar, Montevideo, Uruguay.
2014-Torn Thread-Soca Chapel,Canelones,Uruguay.
Group Exhibitions
2016-Come and see – Doll’s Game-Contemporary Art Space (EAC), Montevideo, Uruguay.
2015-Altered Topography II – Exhibition Center SUBTE, Montevideo, Uruguay.
2014-Viridis – 56th National Visual Arts Prize – National Museum of Visual Arts (MNAV), Montevideo, Uruguay.
2012-The Dress – 55th National Visual Arts Prize – (MNAV), Montevideo, Uruguay.
2012-Ophelias Garden – Art In Situ – Islote Curupí, Paraná, Argentina.