In which the word is transformed into a web whose mesh is riddled with holes, 2025
Magic lantern slides, metal, tape, wire, red lightbulb, clips, nuts and bolts, magnets
Slemmons collection
The artwork interrogates the origins and function of teaching slides as mechanisms of visual instruction, emerging from a box of discarded slides whose only connection was their shared storage—disparate images of ports in China, Native American life, Mexican towns, Indigenous art, and mountain expeditions. By clipping and conjoining these unrelated slides into hybrid scenes, the work employs a sculptural collage strategy that disrupts their original contexts, unraveling how they construct and mediate knowledge through the interplay of gaze, subject, and landscape. These reconfigured compositions, arranged in a cadavre exquis fashion, fold subjects and environments into one another, alternately revealing and obscuring their original contexts, thereby challenging the linearity of historical narratives and opening speculative dimensions for reinterpretation. The slides are held by metallic frames—typically used for electrical sockets—and attached to a repurposed monitor stand with magnetic bars, their industrial rigidity contrasting with the fluidity of the imagined scenes. This tension between archival preservation and playful recombination mirrors the work’s broader interrogation of how images are shaped to convey meaning. The work invites viewers to engage with its layered fragments, prompting reflection on the instability of constructed narratives and the possibilities of reconfiguration.
Alberto Ortega Trejo’s work uses architecture, drawing, sculpture, writing and video to explore histories of indigeneity in architectural modernity, the production of extreme environments, the spatial politics of the colonial encounters in North America and the architectures of social experiments. He has been an IDEAS Fellow of the Society of Architectural Historians and a grantee of Jumex Foundation for Contemporary Art, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and DCASE, among others. His work has been shown at Prairie, DePaul Art Museum, BienalSur, Ca’ Foscari Zattere, Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Andrew Rafacz Gallery, Uri-Eichen Gallery, SpaceP11 and Centro de Arte y Filosofía. He has been a guest speaker for institutions and organizations like DocTalks x MoMA for the Emilio Ambasz Institute, the American Institute of Architects, the Society of Architectural Historians, Smart Museum of Art, Materia Abierta, UPenn, MAS Context and CENTRO.
He is a lecturer of Architecture History and Studio at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Program Manager of the Katz Center for Mexican Studies at the University of Chicago and an Independent Spatial Designer.