Juan Alejandro Landaverde

Focusing on the ever-changing landscape of a community that is identified by its fields of agricultural and blue-collar workforce as it shifts to a more suburban landscape. The work seeks to lay bear the tensions between the clashing lifestyles of this new development and the historically agricultural base community as they compete for space, land and economic gain. As a native of this community, my experience of this inevitable change implicates me directly as simultaneously resistant and complicit. The result is being torn between two competing blue-collar lifestyles, and the social, economic, and political connotations attached to them.

In the creation of my interdisciplinary, and often site specific works, I devote my time to the fields of okra, tomatoes and various other crops, as well as the adjacent construction sites. By combining the materials from both agriculture and construction in my work, a tension develops between the rigidity of the materials used in the construction industry and the delicacy of the plant or crop. I create my artwork alongside the labors as the preform their daily tasks, in an attempt to assimilate their overall experience. By using the actual landscape as my canvas, as well as appropriating materials from these areas, I attempt to understand how these spaces seek to dominate one another, and how it is altered by the presence of the other.