Jennifer Allora & Guillermo Calzadilla, 1974 / 1971

Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla have been producing art together since 1995. Informed by a versatile approach to thought and practice, their ironic, witty, and playful works range across performance, sculpture, audio, video, and photography. Allora received a BA from the University of Richmond in Virginia and completed her MSc at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2003). Calzadilla graduated from the Escuela de Artes Plásticas in Puerto Rico and completed his MFA at Bard College (2001). The duo live and work in Puerto Rico.

Allora and Calzadilla center their artistic practice on historical, cultural, and political dynamics and explore how these shape social life. They present their efforts in public areas as inviting, participatory, open collective experiences. Besides criticizing forces of globalization, imperialism, and consumerism, they also investigate the environment, war, and nationalism. Many of their works are site-specific, and result from thorough research and an associative process. The visual language treats metaphor and satire as no longer simply means to create a narrative, but as artistic devices in themselves.

“Shape Shifter” is part of a series composed of pieces of sandpaper collected from construction sites in Detroit, used by carpenters at construction sites. The grit has picked up the colors of the surfaces that were sanded, and when these same sandpaper pieces are used on surfaces with different colors, the colors smudge. Sandpaper is normally employed to smooth by friction, generating a surface purged of irregularities. The artists’ use of it epitomizes their satirical response to political and social friction.