Karina Alvarado:
Karina Alvarado
Cinema & Media Studies major
Home is always present, between comfort and nostalgia, between idea and physicality, between space and place, always finding a location in a body. As a plus size woman, I struggled as a child to love my body. When I entered my 20s I grew to love myself and that bled into my work.Through lens based technologies I portray the body as a place of being and becoming rather than just a sexual object. Another theme of my work relates to home.I present the notion of home as a place of comfort and nostalgia using landscape photography and portraits of those who are close to me.
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Connection Zero
digital media
For my senior art project I wanted to combine the two themes I enjoy working with. We live in an era where the world is being altered by human impact. because of human action and I wanted to portray the idea that there is a loss of a home due to human caused environmental disasters.. I had chosen the narrative of home being lost due to a forest fire, smog, and oil spill all human induced disasters. Originally I was going to present a two part series, where the first group of images blended untouched nature and the human body leaving home to explore more and the second part symbolizing the body being unable to return home because it has been altered and destroyed. I decided to only keep the second part and instead made a collage using as source material natural disaster images taken from media outlets. We only see these disasters happening through the screens of our phones or TVs but for the most part unable to connect to them, while trauma and narratives of loss and displacement are being experienced and constructed.
Click the images below to view the full-scale pieces.
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