Lisa Alvarado: Shape of Artifact Time

Shape of Artifact Time will serve as a stage for Alvarado and the Natural Information Society who have conceived a site-specific performance for the exhibition opening and will perform their album Mandatory Reality into the sunset on February 28 and March 1, 2025. Lisa Alvarado’s interdisciplinary practice is rooted in cultural tradition and social history. Born and raised in San Antonio, Texas, Alvarado is based in Chicago and works as a visual artist and musician with the ensemble Natural Information Society. Alvarado’s paintings and music traverse thresholds of material and conscious experience, revealing new methods to explore notions of memory and time. Drawing from American muralism, music, woven technologies, and her family’s history as Mexican-Americans in the border region, Alvarado imbues socio-political cues into her suspended abstractions and sonic installations. Alvarado is inspired by the “timing and processes of slow transformation within the ground - transforming minerals, elements, and landscapes.” She calls this pace geologic time and understands these changes as “a metaphor for our internal shifts, such as in how we carry memory, loss, and inherited struggle.” Her first solo institutional exhibition in New York City, Shape of Artifact Time, explores modes of experience with space and light, creating an environment that considers metaphors and poetics between vibration, assemblage, and translation. The work is inspired by gradual paths of transition — the shifts between sunlight and shadow throughout the day, and the generational movements within the earth metamorphosing and realigning inner and outer landscapes.