For Alberto Aguilar, objects are artifacts of lived experience: things whose importance and meaning are derived from their social contexts and how we interact with them. They are also the building blocks of the artist’s archeological assemblages, cobbled from bits of found and personal items that correlate to moments in his own life. Thus, “a factual account,” an exhibition featuring the artist’s mixed-media constructions, text-based signs, sonic works, and a video, presented as much a biographical portrait as a topology of the everyday that reshapes our perceptions of the world.
Aguilar’s makeshift configurations allude to painting and sculpture through their offhand titling and presentation, yet topple the traditions of each in favor of a protean bricolage. In the wall-mounted Painting-like object 1, 2025, postcards from the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam inhabit the same composition as a toy safe, a jar of dried pinto beans, and odds and ends culled from the artist’s studio. A sawhorse atop a concrete base is the support for the floor-bound Sculpture-like object 3, 2025, upon which is stacked three books, a radio, a piece of driftwood, and a block of multicolored Plasticine clay. Both pieces, like all the works here, were accompanied by detailed materials lists that included each item’s provenance. For instance, the sculpture’s cinder-block platform is repurposed from the work of another artist, while the radio (handmade by self-taught artist George Kagan) is a present from a friend. Other elements throughout the show were found, made, or gifted by members of Aguilar’s family—among them, his daughter, Madeleine (also an artist), and wife, Sonia, who works at a thrift store—who were dutifully identified in the show’s didactics.
The regenerative nature of Aguilar’s idiosyncratic accumulations aligns with current practices around creative use and reuse, while playfully reconsidering systems of display and exchange. Such explorations also broaden the dynamics of artistic collaboration, as evident in Sculpture-like object 2, 2024, installed in the gallery’s rear closet. A discarded early-American chair was the central prop for a whole menagerie of materials, including an overdue library book on Anni Albers and a pair of LED lights left over from an exhibition by Christian Gutierrez at Mayfield, a multiuse space Aguilar runs on the grounds of his home in Chicago. Recorded conversations between Aguilar and his elderly aunt Olivia, who has memory loss, become the work’s soundtrack, creating a bittersweet tableau about family and remembrance.
Aguilar employs more mediated forms of interpersonal communication in a series of aluminum street signs fabricated by a local company with whom he often collaborates. Akin to Kay Rosen, Aguilar explores the visual character of language through various types of wordplay based on text messages with friends. In one sign, the word DISMEMBERED was dissected into an ad hoc arrangement; in another, the phrase READ ON A PERPETUAL LOOP was presented as a circle.
The more improvisational Video-like work, 2024, is a dialogue between Aguilar and artist Saoirse Ahumada Furin about memory, creative partnership, and the passage of time. The pair, shown in silhouette facing each other against wavy ribbons of colored light on a flat-screen television, share recollections of how they met and their times together searching for treasured goods. They also describe how the conversation that unfolds is staged, as they admit their uncertainties about its outcome. In the end, they simply agree to jump from the camera’s view.
Throughout “a factual account,” we repeatedly took similar leaps of faith, suspending our beliefs about what we saw before us. Aguilar’s transformational project succeeded in its deep engagement with the stuff of life through often absurdist acts and animations of the ordinary and overlooked. Rejecting promises of joy in decluttering, his work reveals our relational history to things, identifying and articulating ways objects hold their currency, not as commodities but as singular and collective entities that imbue our lives with meaning.
