Alexander Atienza

I first picked up a camera in fifth grade, using a digital point-and-shoot to magnify the inside of a tulip to mythic proportions. The power of the lens to amplify, distort, and render the familiar unfamiliar stayed with me throughout middle and high school, and my interest in photography undertook a narrative dimension as I entered adulthood and sought to capture transience and transformation. My youthful desire to articulate an intense private interior world and explore the gap between subjective experience and objective reality led me in college to major in cognitive science and philosophy, which both continue to influence the themes and methods in my work. A fundamental question with which I must contend is the passive, artificial eye of the camera, and the tension it creates between rationalism and romanticism is a recurring topic of fascination for me. Film is a medium that allows the viewer to directly inhabit the perspective of another, and it is in the art of filmmaking that I found a bridge between the objective and subjective, the rational and romantic. 

About the Artist

Alexander Philip Atienza holds an MFA from the University of Southern California, where he studied Film and Television Production, and a BA from the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied Cognitive Science and Philosophy. His work has been featured in the Penn Review, Aint-Bad Magazine, and Bright Lights Film Journal. He is a Susanna Lachs Fellow and Locarno BaseCamp Academy participant. 

about.me/alexanderatienza

Flâneur Mécanique
2018
Two-channel HD video installation
4 minutes

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