Like and Subscribe, Ariella Granados

Verbal Description

Ariella Granados

Like and Subscribe, 2025

Inkjet prints

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.

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 uses green-screen shades of green as a visual and symbolic foundation to situate the disabled body within a variety of social and political settings. 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.

Ariella 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, and MCA Chicago.

Like and Subscribe is presented in conjunction with UIC Gallery 400’s Fall 2025 exhibitions Don’t mind if I do, Finnegan Shannon: I wish gays hung out at places where we could sit down, Sandie Yi: Digital Technology, and agustine zegers: A toxin threatens, but it also beckons, on view through
December 13, 2025.

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

Verbal Description

In two of the gallery’s large, north-facing windows, two cartoonish and fragmented green faces can be seen from outside. Cutouts of the artists’ face have been arranged over a bright green background with text bubbles.

In the left window, the eyes look down towards the ground. The lips are wearing bright red lipstick. They are pursed but open, showing off a smile and a gold tooth. The text bubble next to it reads, “stop watching me plz.”

In the right window, the eyes look to the left in the direction of the other window. The mouth is slightly agape revealing the tip of the gold tooth and other teeth. The text bubble next to this one reads, “But it fuels the machine.”