Alejandro Tamayo
Revealing the Invisible in a 1:1 Recreation
Art Windsor-Essex through Feb. 2, 2025
by Ana Ghookassian, December 19, 2024
Fig 1. Image courtesy of Art Windsor-Essex, photograph by Frank Piccolo
For artists, the conception of exhibition spaces—often emerging from the studio or creative workspace—extends beyond a mere site of presentation, encompassing the materials, didactic frameworks, and contextual decisions that shape the work’s ultimate form. From the perspective of the artist, these curatorial choices are most impactful before the work departs the studio, or more accurately, before it fully materializes within the exhibition space. In Alejandro Tamayo’s work, the studio is the exhibition. It is a presentation of the interactions that have preoccupied the artist—his relationships with those encounters and objects, both before and after their installation in a gallery where they take on a new life. “What begins in the studio is redefined within the gallery.” *
In his exhibition At the Moment, This Work is Like This, Windsor, Ontario-based artist Alejandro Tamayo’s drawings, installations, and sculptures frame themselves through his awareness of time, its passing, wasting, marking, and keeping, through the recording of some repetitive measures and ordinary, perhaps unnoticed connections. Evident in the presence of bottle caps, lids, and rubber bands, Tamayo is showcasing an engagement with the commonplace and draws attention to his own preoccupation with the variations and details embedded in the routines, tasks, and repetitions of everyday life.
Just before we move on, I want to pause and pose questions I typically ask myself when facing readymade works in exhibition spaces. I’ll ask you to keep these questions in mind while reading this text. Please.
Is this work painfully self-aware?
Does it possess some form of emotional intelligence that is beyond me?
Is the visual language intellectual rather than emotional? Is it both?
Are the objects self-aware? UNA COSA, DOS COSAS, TRES COSAS (figure 2).
With those simple questions in mind, let’s consider Tamayo’s relationship to his studio. His meticulous, 1:1 recreation of this space within the gallery—replicated measurement by measurement—reveals an intense study of the walls, corners, and crevices. The 1:20 maquette of this studio at the entrance of the gallery (figure 3) shows not only the precise measurements of the studio but also the transformations the space will have throughout the duration of the show. This act of spatial observation, dynamic and evolving throughout the exhibition’s different lifecycles, invites us to revisit the spaces we inhabit—our living and workspaces—and examine them anew. It encourages us to uncover the overlooked details that shape our everyday environments.
* Koochak, Niku. “At the Moment This Work Is like This: Alejandro Tamayo - Art Windsor.” Art Windsor Essex, 15 Oct. 2024, artwindsoressex.ca/exhibitions/at-the-moment-the-work-is-like-this-alejandro-tamayo/.
Fig.2 UNA COSA, DOS COSAS, TRES COSAS. Photograph by Ana Ghookassian
Tamayo’s practice foregrounds the dialogue between the artist and their surroundings, suggesting that the studio is not merely a site of production but also a repository of memory and a container for potential. By transforming his studio into an installation, he invites readymade concepts to elevate ordinary and functional environments into paused scenes that call for contemplation. Much like found objects taking on new significance when recontextualized in a gallery, the replicated studio becomes a site of transformation, where its original purpose is both preserved and transcended. Perhaps Tamayo’s intentions and objectives are the investigation, documentation, and validation of singular marked and unmarked moments within his studio space. This layered engagement transforms the gallery into both a reflection of the artist’s process and a prompt for viewers to interrogate their own spatial awareness, encouraging them to question the ways in which spaces and objects acquire meaning through context.
I just moved to a new home where my partner and I had to repatch most of the drywall and repaint every wall in our apartment. While I do not produce artwork here and it is not a studio space, I find myself intimately aware of this environment in a way I never was with my previous living space where I’d spent the last four years. While I unscrewed the outlets, tapped the baseboards, sanded the drywall, and so on, I realized that this level of care and attention might still not compare to Alejandro’s records of his space. It’s an uncomfortable truth that forces me to confront what is most precious to me and makes me reconsider my relationship(s) to the rooms I live and work in.
Tamayo’s recreation of his studio at the Art Windsor-Essex (AWE) gallery is reminiscent of another prominent practice within the last modern century: the practice of miniatures. This practice is a physical record of time and action in a room that has at some point required the attention, observation, and care of its creator. To recreate a room in miniature, in painstaking detail and awareness, is a difficult and time-consuming job, and it demands an understanding of the room and the objects within it that go beyond inhabitancy. While Tamayo is showing us a recreation of his studio space in 1:1 structural detail, the concept of the miniature lingers as an ironic counterpoint. Miniatures, by their very nature, distill larger spaces into smaller, more accessible scales, allowing viewers to see relationships, patterns, and dynamics that might be overlooked at full size. This act of reduction ironically highlights the complexities of a space, drawing attention to its unnoticed features and its intimate, often invisible, narratives. Tamayo’s work compels us to consider how shifting scale—whether to miniature or full-scale recreation—alters the ways we perceive and relate to our environments. As noted before, perhaps, it might even push us to reconsider what is most important to us in our surroundings. What do we hold most dear in our rooms, and why?
Tamayo’s own presence in the recreated studio introduces another fascinating tension: as the artist, he is both the creator and a visitor in the space. As we’ve noted, within the gallery context, the studio—once a site of production—changes into an object of contemplation. This shift inevitably alters his relationship to it. In this recreated environment, Tamayo is no longer the inhabitant deeply immersed in the routines of making but instead becomes an audience member of his own spatial history. The familiarity of the room’s details may evoke a sense of homecoming, yet the act of stepping back and viewing it as an artwork could simultaneously distance him from it.
This dual role as both artist and observer invites questions about authorship and perception as well. Does the recreation still feel like "his" studio, or has it become something else entirely in its transposition to the gallery? In this liminal space, Tamayo’s position mirrors that of the viewer, encountering the room as both intimately known and newly estranged. This paradox—of being at once deeply connected and slightly removed—underscores the complex ways in which spaces can shift in meaning when framed within the context of ‘art’ and ‘art object’, pushing both the artist and the audience to reconsider their relationship to familiar places.
Of course, the changes in the exhibition space, though visible in their scheduled transformation, do not obscure the process; rather, they emphasize it. The black, red, and blue tape marks on the gallery floor (figure 4), mirroring the markings seen in the maquette (figure 3), mark not only the boundaries of the space but also the passage of time within the exhibition itself. These lines are not simply arbitrary—they are temporal guides, pointing toward future alterations that will unfold gradually, inviting the viewer to witness the exhibition's evolution at once. This act of transformation, through these subtle markers, makes the gallery as a dynamic environment, where change is both anticipated and tracked. Tamayo’s use of this system reflects an inherent awareness of time’s passing, not as a mere background condition but as something that actively participates in the work’s unfolding narrative.
As I engage with the recreation of Tamayo’s studio, I am faced with a space I may never fully visit or understand in its original form, yet one that is presented to me with a degree of intimacy and honesty. This recreation is devoid of the contextual noise that would typically accompany a real, lived-in environment—there are few fleeting personal moments and no unpredictable interactions that might alter my perception. What I encounter is a distilled version of that space, a version curated specifically to convey meaning and insight. The space’s significance becomes clearer through its reduction to essential elements—it’s 2x4 bones—allowing me to see it more clearly, in a way I might never have in its original, unmediated state.
This separation of time and space also draws attention to the inherent weight of time itself. How much importance do we place in our time, and what does it truly mean to us? A minute can seem fleeting, but stretch it out to three minutes, and suddenly, the difference becomes tangible. These small increments, these shifts, become markers of value and understanding, shaping our experience of the space. Tamayo’s work reminds us that time, in all its infinitesimal measurements, impacts how we relate to the world around us. The materials and objects that surround us may become invisible in the hustle of daily life, but in this reflective space, we are urged to reconsider what is truly valuable in the environments we inhabit. Within this space, we are offered a chance to slow down and reconsider our influences, to rediscover the importance of the things we often overlook. It is a gentle reminder that meaning can be found in even the most mundane, everyday objects—objects we may take for granted and meanings that we can easily reassign.
Fig. 3. Exhibition Score. Image courtesy of Art Windsor-Essex, photograph by Frank Piccolo
I have had the privilege of visiting Alejandro’s studio while he was completing his PhD at York University, where our conversations often revolved around the space itself—its objects, its textures, and its history. What stood out to me in those moments was how the studio, for Alejandro, was never separate from the gallery. The process of creation—whether in the studio or in the exhibition space—always involved the final presentation. This understanding, which seems almost intuitive to him, shapes the way we are asked to approach his work. There is no division between space and art; instead, both are part of a continuum that challenges the viewer to reflect on their relationship to both the artist and the work itself.
There is also an undeniable humor in Tamayo’s cementing of the work. Framing a small sketch of the same drawings—one vertical and one horizontal—and then naming the works Drawing given to the framing company for making the frame itself (horizontal version) (figure 5) and Drawing given to the framing company for making the frame itself (vertical version) (figure 6) carries a unique kind of charm. One of the many traces of encounters embedded within these works can be found in the framed pieces—the presentation of the information in a solidified, formal way. The birth of the sketch itself can certainly be seen as complex in its simplicity, but we cannot deny that it is also funny. Very, very funny.
I’m sure the framer was blown away by the request from Alejandro as well, and I’m even more certain that they followed up with countless questions about the framing: “Should the piece float in the center of the frame?” “Shadowbox?” “Set back?” “No mat?” “Cream-white for the mat behind the sketch?” “Textured mat?” “Acid-free cotton?” “Museum-grade glass?”
The labor and technical complexity within the tradition of framing adds so much to the presence of the framed pieces in the exhibition. Beyond the two sketches at the entrance and their cementation within the walls of the frame, the frames themselves serve as proof of the encounters these works have had beyond their presentation at AWE. They mark yet another moment in the works’ histories before their arrival at the gallery. The same, of course, can be said about the bottle caps framed in glass and wood, preserving the work in an archival way (figure 7).
In terms of the language surrounding the show, the pieces with conscious references are titled as such—with an organizing principle present. In fact, reflecting on this exact use of language throughout Tamayo’s work, the word choice remains as one of the many consistent threads in his career. There is continuity in the presentation and preservation of the work that is a perspective familiar to Tamayo’s viewers, and the structure changes that are scheduled within the exhibition’s timeline further stress the weight and value of the details and their relationships to the audience.
Tamayo’s exhibition is a study in transparency, but first, it is a study. There is nothing hidden in the changes that occur within the gallery space; everything is on display, visible to the viewer as it was intended to be. The drawings, the objects, the shifts in the exhibition’s physical layout—all of it is revealed, without pretense. This openness aligns with the core of Tamayo’s artistic philosophy: a commitment to the honest representation of time, space, and process. In this way, the gallery becomes not just a space for the presentation of art but a site for the exploration of how we relate to the physical world around us.
Fig. 4. Image courtesy of Art Windsor-Essex, photograph by Frank Piccolo
Fig. 6. Drawing given to the framing company for making the frame itself (vertical version). Image courtesy of Art Windsor Essex, photograph by Stephen Nilsson
Fig. 5. Drawing given to the framing company for making the frame itself (horizontal version). Image courtesy of Art Windsor Essex, photograph by Stephen Nilsson
Fig. 7. Framed works. Image courtesy of Art Windsor-Essex, photograph by Frank Piccolo
Fig. 8. Image courtesy of Art Windsor-Essex, photograph by Frank Piccolo