Top
Work by Juan Alvarez: a person in a gray uniform jacket and red tie wears a large cartoonish bald mask with worried eyes, with similar figures behind.
Text Link

International Residency

Juan Alvarez

United States

United States

Dominican Republic

Dominican Republic

Caracol Caracol, 2021, Video, 1min 40 sec. Image description: A video still of a person in a blue fighter-style costume with white hair buns striking a pose over a collage background, beside vertical text "MACARRON."
Damascus, 2023, Video, 1min 40sec. Image description: A glitchy, pixelated video still with stacked yellow and white game-style text listing "GREENMON," "REDMON," and "CYANMON" over a small rider on a horse.
Early Sunset, 2024, Video, 1min 35sec. Image description: A pixelated video still of a blue Earth with an orange patch of land, floating among streaks of blue light on a black background.
The Hornet, 2024, Video, 1min 24sec. Image description: Aerial video still of a person in a blue and white patterned outfit and pale sneakers lying on dark green grass.
No items found.

Juan Alvarez, aka Wamoo, is a Dominican-born, Washington Heights-raised music and media-based artist, working at the border between visual art, music and live performance. Taking shape as both video and self-produced music, Wamoo’s practice draws from his personal experience immigrating to the United States as a child, and the tools, like video games and music, which allowed him to both adapt to his new context as well as cope with it overtime. Reinventing these memories as material through his experience, he constructs experimental music videos self produced and found footage with aesthetics, characters, and cosplay to both regenerate and mold video game characters, early digital aesthetics and music into a multi-dimensional experience.

 

Juan Alvarez, aka Wamoo, is a Dominican-born, Washington Heights-raised and based musician and media-based artist, working at the border between visual art, music and live performance. His audiovisual work is constructed by means of collage art, reconstructing existing materials and bringing them into new contexts. He is mainly inspired by the video art of Joan Jonas and Pipilotti Rist, as well as music producers J Dilla and Tainy.

He has exhibited at the Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center, SuperBlue Miami, Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Andrew Freedman Home, among others. He has also been featured on publications like "Obsidian: Literature and Arts in the African Diaspora", an arts publication published by Illinois State University; and "Apricity", published by the University of Texas at Austin. He studied at the University at Albany, SUNY, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in two concentrations, Philosophy and World History.

Read more

Learn more about the Curatorial Fellowship