Statement & Bio | devinalejandrowilder

Image ID: Dev Lounging in the Grass, Devin lays in a field of grass wearing a white tank top, blue denim jeans, and dirtied white chuck converse. They have a short bob haircut and black framed glasses. They’re supporting their head in their hands as they casually lean back into the ground, compressing the grass.

Statement:

Devin Alejandro-Wilder (they/we) is a latine visual artist and occasional drag performer who moves across new media and lens-based practices to haunt, inquire, investigate, and confront the beliefs and systems we exist entangled within. Born deaf, queer, and non-binary their work explores themes orbiting around diasporic systems, in/visibility, “performance”, [human and non-human] collaboration, “hyper-labor”, and the false binary between care/harm. Transfiguring materials informed by interlocking queer-latine-disabled histories through intimate lived experience, their site-specific, sculptural, and video-performance works criticize the roles and narratives we embody alongside the legacies and artifacts we both inherit and perpetually reconstruct.

Bio:

After relocating their studio practice from the East Coast in 2019 to their native Austin, TX they founded the virtual/IRL free school initiative Free Skool Now with support from The Museum of Human Achievement where they were a studio member from 2020 - 2022. Since joining the The Revolution School (Los Angeles), an open collective initiated by Jennifer Moon as a Commonwealth and Council Summer School program in August 2020, they collectively accepted a 2022 Creative Capital award in support of their ongoing trauma-processing AI-companion project My Little BEI .

Alejandro-Wilder has received generous fiscal and in-kind support from the Creative Capital Foundation, Cultural Arts Division of the City of Austin, The Museum of Human Achievement, Feminist Center For Creative Works, Shelburne Craft School, Austin Mutual Aid, and Generator Makerspace in the form of awards, residencies, fiscal sponsorship, honorariums, and educational scholarship. They have also been featured as a contributor for the art books and art and literary magazines, Psst Press (photography, writing, 2022), Land Chapters (photography, painting, print, 2021), Tele- (installation/film, essay, web, 2019), and peach fuzz (photography, print, 2020). In 2022 their collective contribution to The Mind’s Eye: A LACMA Poster Project, titled ND Time Bandits: Co-adventures in Reshaping Time made in collaboration with The Revolution School was acquired by LACMA’s permanent collection for archival care.

Fantasma (Dev/in) Scrooger Card, The Revolution Deck

Image ID: a playing card such as that for a fantasy game describes the character "Fantasma" a ghost-like "Scrooger" with team affiliations, a robot dog companion, superpowers, and vulnerabilities.