Please Don't Let it Be Too Close: Watch Party and Q&A with Alicia Grullón

Please Don’t Let it Be Too Close is the title of a new video and exhibition by Alicia Grullón commissioned by SPACES, which looks at the 2020 elections from the point of view of workers and the worries tying them together. During her virtual residency with SPACES, Grullón interviewed participants from the Cleveland area and broader midwest regarding the presidential election and their time in quarantine. These interviews formed the basis of her script visually supported with film montage, music, and theater techniques to conceive a narrative documenting the impact the election has had on people’s lives. Shot entirely in her home due to COVID 19, she reveals parts of her surroundings in flux with elements both accidental and intentional or layered upon with green screen. The installation is completed with a selection of Grullón’s self-portrait series, “From March to June: At Home with Essential Workers” previously an online exhibition at The Bronx Museum of Arts in 2020.

This new work is a continuation of her process using visual and embodied performative practices to create alternatives in archiving history. Reminiscent of the work of Anna Deavere Smith and Martha Wilson, Grullón combines these performative traditions with her own practices in photography and video in her ongoing interdisciplinary practice towards critiques of the politics of presence, arguing for the inclusion of disenfranchised communities in political and social spheres. As she notes in her short piece for Verso Book’s Blog Hot City, “In my work I want to encourage viewers to reflect upon my performances as particular processes where I express the undoing of colonial history through my body and actions. In a broader sense, I use photography to unravel the complexities of my signification in a straightforward manner relying only on the camera and performance as apparatus.”

Please Don’t Let it Be Too Close is on view at SPACES January 22-March 19, 2021.