BIO

Alex Valls is a self-taught, multi-media artist with a focus on found objects, installations and sculptural work. Born in 1988 in Miami, Valls was raised as a first-generation Cuban American and later attended Emerson College where she received a bachelor of science in Marketing Communications and Sociology. Valls spent several years working in advertising and media before pursuing her art practice full-time. Living and working between Miami and New York City, Valls was a recent artist-in-residence at Vermont Studio Center, CRETA Rome and Leipzig International Art Programme. As the director and co-founder of the collective, Good To Know.FYI, Valls has been the recipient of various grants, including the Tulsa Artist Fellowship and Creative Time. She has also supported cultural partnerships with Untitled Art Fair, Art Basel Miami, HistoryMiami Museum, Cuban Heritage Collection.

Valls recent projects include a group exhibition of her personal works with La Pera projects at ICNY Instituto Cervantes( New York, NY), participant of the group show at The Hole (New York, NY), a collaboration with EXILE Books via Locust Project’s WaveMaker Grant with the Andy Warhol Foundation (Miami, FL), and a participating artist in the Together Project at the Seven Seas Motel for Miami Art Week 2021.

studio location: Williamsburg Brooklyn, New York // North Miami, Florida

contact: vallsalexandra@gmail.com ( last name, first name ) // 305-528-3600

ARTIST STATEMENT

The subject of my recent work derives from environmental and cultural sentiments representing the shifting realities of our landscape. I collect detritus such as plastic, metal, wood and glass, and re-purpose them into sculptural compositions. Although the elements are most often commercially produced, the process by which I find and incorporate them into a work comes organically. The objects reference the area in which they are found and presented; owing to a particular place or city yet allowing for a reconsideration of their future. Viewing these concrete objects outside of their predetermined context, allows for this visual and or conceptual abstraction. To expose, acknowledge and play with these elements of degradation means to continue their own trajectory as part of our human story.

Overarching themes are the following; a physical connection to ocean and water, the Caribbean, the human condition and its twisted love affairs of many genres, Cuban identity, religious references as a means of exploring a Catholic upbringing and its idea of salvation, and most poignantly often revealed in my work is a dark yet playful critique of our unsustainable geological footprint. The work manifests itself freely, after which its intention is examined, when that is made clear in no given timeframe, a concept and direction is developed, tied up in a pretty little bow with a repurposed string.