Andrius Alvarez-Backus

Lives and works in Brooklyn, NY, USA

Artist statement

My practice begins with familiar objects made strange: a disco ball dissected, a pair of feet detached from their body, two beds fused into a dance floor. Through mixed-media assemblage, I transform these everyday forms into surreal compositions that stage personal allegories of intimacy and embodiment drawn from my experience as a Filipino-American. My work interrogates where beauty and abjection meet, and how materiality conveys cultural meaning. Pairs and doubles recur throughout my sculptures and drawings, evoking erotic couplings and the longing to unify what has been fractured. Household objects (fences, chairs, socks) are reconfigured into domestic fantasies that register imperfect yet enduring unions. I bring these reclaimed relics into conversation with natural mediums such as sand, Manila palm leaves, and wood, which transmit latent histories of Filipino migration. Garden statues brought from the Philippines by my great uncle, soil gathered from Queens where my grandparents first immigrated, and confetti collected from my favorite queer nightclub thus become traces of legacy and inheritance. In queering familiar forms, I ask how bodies are constructed and disciplined through material culture and object attachment. Like many in the Filipino diaspora, I come from a family of surgeons and medical practitioners, and that lineage informs how I understand the body: not as a fixed or private thing, but as a relational site, continually made and remade through the hands...

Artwork