Ariella Granados explores disability identity’s relationship to utopia through alter egos that borrow the visual language of Mexican television, YouTube vlogging, and world-building video games. With a keen interest in the uses of chromakey green screens to render space within cinema, Granados’ performances expand their body from the real world to the digital through playful diaristic narratives. Subtitles become a space where they meditate on their inner life and what it means to be chronically online. For Streetside, a public exhibition project on the Gallery’s north-facing windows on Van Buren Street, Granados displays a series of stills from a video performance whose main character engages in the personal rituals of getting ready, such as applying makeup and styling hair. This character is caught in a struggle to become a spectacle while being in control of their vulnerability and hyper-visible image on a global online platform.

ABOUT

Ariella Granados is a multidisciplinary artist based in Chicago, IL., whose work utilizes video, sound, costuming, makeup, and sculpture to explore the liminal space between fiction and truth. Their work integrates green as a signifier of rendering the disabled body against the complexity of the sociopolitical landscape. Granados’ work is intertwined with the consumer’s inability to not be fully satisfied with the consumption of commodities. Utilizing dynamic world-building techniques, they critique the body as a commodity itself, offering their own lived experience as a bicultural person. Through their work, Granados invites the viewer into a world where they must confront questions of agency and authenticity. Granados holds a BFA from the University of Illinois Chicago. Her work has been exhibited at the Minnesota Museum of American Art, Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art, UIC Gallery 400, and MCA Chicago.

Ariella Granados

Support for Like and Subscribe is provided by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Illinois Arts Council, the School of Art & Art History, the College of Architecture, Design, and the Arts, and the University of Illinois Chicago.