Espejos: Renata Cassiano Alvarez

Espejos: Renata Cassiano Alvarez

March 4 – 26 | Opening Reception Saturday, March 4th 1-9PM

COOP Gallery is pleased to present Espejos by Renata Cassiano Alvarez, the winner of COOP Gallery’s 2022 Open Call to artists. Espejos follows Cassiano Alvarez’s obsession with material and color language, physicality and reflections, in this case mirrors, especially the ones attached to Tezcatlipoca, the Mexica god of transformation and change. These artifacts are the result of ideas and experiences around language, identity and self-reflection. As a transnational artist, the ability to move from one language to another is crucial to Cassiano Alvarez and illuminates the centrality of change within the human experience. Espejos comprises a series of glaze and obsidian mirrors inspired by the original Smoking Mirror dedicated to Tezcatlipoca, together with a group of oversized clay and obsidian knives and artifacts. Resting on tiled structures, these objects speak of a connection with architectural details from Cassiano Alvarez’s home in México and the tile as another flat plane that functions as reflection. 

More about the Artist
Renata Cassiano Alvarez is a Mexican-Italian artist born in Mexico City and is currently the Visiting Assistant Professor of Art at the University of Arkansas School of Art. Cassiano Alvarez’s artistic practice is based on a constant search for developing an intimate collaborative relationship with material and material language. Influenced by archeology and history, she is interested in the power of the object as survival – objects with a sense of permanence and timelessness, and language as transformation; specially how adopting a different language can affect the physicality of the human body, and how this translates into material. Her work has been exhibited internationally and can be found in public and private collections around the world. She works between her studio in Veracruz, Mexico and Fayetteville, Arkansas.