Alana Julia Ortiz
Born: Americana, São Paulo, Brazil
Lives: Americana, São Paulo, Brazil
Washing Clothes I, from the Invisible series (2022)
Photograph
Various sizes
Alana Julia Ortiz is a visual artist, mother and sole caregiver to 7-year-old Gaia. Ortiz’s artistic practice is deeply rooted in motherhood, the experience of the female body, and the structural violence that shapes the lives of girls and women.
Cultivating an intimate relationship with art through oil painting — a medium that remains central to her work since childhood. Ortiz’s study of Psychology and Anthropology continue to influence her artistic research, especially in relation to subjectivity, the body, and social constructions. In 2020, she began to dedicate herself to contemporary art, encouraged by somatic practices connected to dance. Exploring the intersections between the intimate and the political, delicacy and denunciation, her work moves across multiple mediums including installation, photography, textile art, and oil painting. She also uses statistical data as an aesthetic and a critical tool to create tension between art, information, and lived experience. Her current research addresses motherhood, sexuality, abortion, domestic violence and the social position of women.
In Washing Clothes I, the body appears as a blur, the result of a long exposure on the camera that dissolves her silhouette as she performs the repetitive gesture of washing clothes. This image symbolises the social erasure of domestic care work—an invisible, essential, and undervalued labor, mostly carried out by women and mothers.