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“My time as a Studio Residency artist at the Art & History Museums of Maitland unfolded during a period of personal loss, disability, recovery, and change. Throughout that year, Maitland became a generous site of support, reflection, and experimentation, allowing me to reconsider how lived experience could be transformed through material, humor, myth, and invention.
I feel a strong connection to André Smith’s legacy: his architectural imagination, artistic freedom, and continued ambition while navigating physical disability. That history resonated with my own experience of injury and adaptation during the residency, creating a meaningful dialogue between body, site, time, and artistic labor.
Repair Shop for Broken Myths marks a turning point in my practice and functions as a makeshift repair shop, studio, and laboratory for mythological world-building. It brings together personal experience, collective histories, and reinterpreted stories, creating a space where inherited narratives, damaged symbols, and unfinished selves are taken apart, examined, misread, patched, and rebuilt.
At the center of this organized chaos is a satyr figure, emerging as the final artwork made during my residency at the Art & History Museums of Maitland and marking a symbolic threshold in my artistic direction. Part trickster, part animal, the satyr became a bold avatar of self, a figure for escaping physical limitation while recovering from a major injury.” - Alexander Alvarez
During scheduled sessions, visitors may choose to sit with the artist, share a reflection, and have a small portrait-like sculpture created from the interaction. These figures are then added to the installation, becoming part of the work’s evolving mythology.