statement

My work utilizes a largely abstract visual language, bringing disparate physical and conceptual elements into the same context. I often combine commercial images, graphics and text with painted forms of my own invention. As these multiple elements are modified and altered through both, the physical reconstruction of forms and compositional decisions, a larger aesthetic constellation is created. In working in this manner, I hope to reanimate the symbols and narrow classifications we live by and the accompanying, often unaesthetic solutions we find in the world.

In the conceptual space between mass-produced materials and my painted response, I work with classifying systems that shape identity.  These classifying systems include aspects of gender, standards of beauty, innocence and desire. The diverse materials I am drawn to find their origins in an array of sources, from commercial advertisements and magazine articles, to sticker books and commercial packaging.  By purposely engaging these materials of our consumerist culture, I seek to invoke the mass-produced wish and fantasy fulfillment as well as the promised perfect world they claim to reference.

Through a process of dissection and reconfiguration, traits of the original materials are amplified or modified to create new forms that oscillate between the abstract and referential. While I use actual materials from the landscape of the real, once they enter a work of art everything becomes fictive.

bio

born: 1964, Kingston, Jamaica

education:

Indiana University, MFA, 1993
Rhode Island School of Design, BFA, 1988
Yale Summer School of Music and Art, 1987

selected awards/honors

Ellen Battel Stoeckel Fellowship, Yale Summer School of Music and Art, 1987
British Columbia Cultural Grant, Vancouver, BC, Cananda, 1985, 1986, 1987

selected publications

Colorado State University; Drawing in The Expanded Field, Exhibition Catalog, Fort Collins, CO, 2010
Manifest Creative Research Gallery; Guidebook, Contemporary Collage and Assemblage, Volume 45, Cincinnati, OH, Manifest Press, 2010
Jacksonville Museum of Modern Art; The Consuming Image: New Painterly Pop, Exhibition Brochure, Jacksonville, FL, 2002
New American Paintings; The Open Studio Press, Essay by Joan Rothfuss, 2000

selected solo or two-person exhibits

Alisa Henriquez: Paintings, District Arts Gallery, Birmingham, MI, 2005
Alisa Henriquez: Recent Paintings, Gallery 138, Kent State University, Kent, OH, 1999
Alisa Henriquez: Encoded Patterns, ARC Gallery, Chicago, IL, 1998
Alisa Henriquez: Recent Paintings, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, IL, 1997

selected group shows

Popular Culture Re-Constructed, Memorial Hall Painting Gallery, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI, 2010
Drawing in the Expanded Field, Hatton Gallery, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO, 2010
86.28 Miles, Detroit Industrial Projects, Detroit, MI, 2008
The Consuming Image: New Painterly Pop, Jacksonville Museum of Modern Art, Jacksonville, FL, 2002