Bio

Vicente Cayuela (b. 1998, Santiago de Chile) is a Boston-based interdisciplinary artist whose work is a reflection on popular youth culture and traumatic experiences of growing up. By creating photographs from meticulously hand-made sets and installations, Cayuela explores the ways in which photographs can be constructed and serve as a medium for healing and identity (re)generation. With his eye for visual bait and graphic overload, he incorporates a playful array of creative mediums and techniques to create layered narrative images that oscillate between the comic and the melancholic, the public and the autobiographical, youth and something vaguely defined as "maturity."

His photographic and sculptural work has been exhibited at several venues in New England, including the Griffin Museum of Photography, the Lafayette City Center Gallery, and the Abigail Ogilvy Gallery in the SoWa Art and Design District. His photographs have been published in literary magazines and journals in the United States and the United Kingdom.

Website: www.vicentecayuela.com

Instagram: vicente.cayuela.art

JUVENILIA - Series

Juvenilia (plural noun)

Ju·ve·nil·ia Ä jü-və-ˈni-lē-ə Ä

1 : compositions produced in the artist's or author's youth

2 : artistic or literary compositions suited to or designed for the young

JUVENILIA is a series of constructed photographs inspired by childhood trauma and romantic notions of coming-of-age in popular youth culture. At the intersection of photography, set-design, installation, historic photographic processes, sculpture, and readymades, this series examines how photographs can be constructed and serve as a material for art-making.

Echoing the aesthetics of advertising and social media culture, JUVENILIA is a reflection on the commercialization of trauma in the digital age, where the exposure of the fragmented self becomes an object of voyeuristic consumption. In response to this contemporary phenomenon, JUVENILIA attempts to find alternative ways to talk about how early abuse challenges our ability to function in social settings and interpersonal relationships.

With touches of angst, camp, and youth paraphernalia, this body of work shines a light on rarely addressed issues of growing up such as loss, addiction, social alienation, trauma, self-perception, and the early quests for freedom. Beyond glitz and sentimentality, JUVENILIA is a reflection on the fleeting but pivotal moments of early character formation that, as quickly as they pass, leave lasting marks on our developing psyche.