Lesser Gonzalez’s Alternative Artifacts series unsettles our assumptions of ancient artifacts and the illusion of, what the artist calls, “indeterminable origin.” Through digital artistry, Gonzalez fabricates objects that possess the aesthetic of notable artifacts within a simulated museum archival process (i.e. digital photography). In doing so, he questions the routine digitization of objects through a tongue-and-cheek portrayal of the sterile and lonesome cataloging of their current existence. No longer useful, the object behind the glass calls upon a common history. Never useful (in a traditional sense), but wildly relevant, the digital object magnifies the current aesthetic moment.
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Alternative Artifact, 3d rendering, 8in. x 10in.
Alternative Artifact 2, 3d rendering, 8in. x 10in.
Alternative Artifact 3, 3d rendering 8in. x 10in.
Alternative Artifact 4, 3d rendering 8″ x 10″
Check out Jessica Mairena’s response to Alternative Artifact.
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Lesser Gonzalez Alvarez was born in Havana, Cuba in 1983. He is an interdisciplinary artist and writer of poetry. He holds his BFA and Master of Arts in Digital Arts degrees from the Maryland Institute College of Art, and is currently supplementing his studio practice with Archaeological, Geological, and Paleontological field research. Lesser’s work is inspired by proto-languages, cuneiform, and a study of the archaic in the context of contemporary experience. While his works are informed by ancient symbolism and regular archaeological inquiry, he is not interested in revisiting primitivism, but rather in presenting a contemporary language that is at once familiar, yet of indeterminable origin, devoid of provenance, owing more perhaps to the concept of planned obsolescence pushed to an absurd conclusion, than to primitive mark-making.
