Vanitas — Aaron Alamo

Vanitas: Not-so-still Life

It all began with fungus-covered lemons inside a refrigerator at the age of 11.
I’m a Mexican artist that grew up in a single-working mother home. With little to no time for my mother to clean around the house, I became obsessed with the beauty of the micro-organisms that grow on decaying food.

For the last 10 years I have been working on “Vanitas: Not-so-still Life”, a project that shows the destruction of a photograph through time. Inspired by traditional vanitas paintings, with elements that are carefully chosen to give them a modern twist: a skull with orthodontist braces, a bucket of KFC, a plastic cup, etc., The original photographs were created in 2008. They were printed on cotton paper and “treated” with humidity and a culture of fungus in a dark place. The process of decay was photographed every year for the next 10 years creating a series of images of decay and transformation. This series demonstrates how nothing is eternal -not even a photograph.

The work has been exhibited at:
Aqua Art Basel 2018, Miami FL
See.me at Scope Art Basel, 2018, Miami FL
Contemporary Venice 2018, It's Liquid, Venezia, Italia
Open Borders 2019. Odetta Gallery, Brooklyn, NY

Part of CO.LA Contemporary Latin American Art Collective