Washed Up: Transforming a Trashed Landscape


Alejandro Durán is a multimedia artist whose practice utilizes photography and installation to examine the fraught intersections of humans and nature, revealing the pervasive impact of consumer culture on the natural world.

Artist Bio

Washed Up is an environmental installation and photography project that transforms the international debris washing up on Mexico’s Caribbean coast into aesthetic yet disquieting works. The artist proposes the creation of a “Museum of Garbage” in the Mexican jungle to exhibit new large-scale works.


Award Year
2019
Status

In Progress

Duran-Alejandro

Alejandro Durán

Brooklyn, NY | Sian Ka'an, Mexico

Alejandro Durán is a multimedia artist whose practice utilizes photography and installation to examine the fraught intersections of humans and nature, revealing the pervasive impact of consumer culture on the natural world. His current work serves to mirror the reality of our current environmental predicament through a surreal aesthetic approach. The resulting photographs depict a new form of colonization by consumerism, where even undeveloped land is not safe from the far-reaching impact of our culture of disposable products.

Durán received En Foco’s 2011 New Works Award, was included in the 2012 Bronx Biennial of Latin American Art, and was nominated for the Prix Pictet and the Prix Thun for Art and Ethics. He has exhibited his work at the Galería Octavio Paz at the Mexican consulate in New York and was Hunter College’s Artist-in-Residence in 2014-15. Internationally, his work has been featured at Fotografie Forum Frankfurt in Germany and the Mt. Rokko International Photography Festival in Japan. His photographs have been featured in National Geographic, Time, ABC News, The Huffington Post, and the New York Daily News. Born in Mexico City, he received an MA in Teaching from Tufts University and an MFA in poetry from the New School for Social Research.