Alex Guillen explores real spaces digitally by recreating online, interactive versions of places significant to her. In “i went to college and all i got was an art degree”, Guillen maps out her recent change of scenery from moving back home with no bedroom after graduating. This piece continues Guillen’s practice of revealing private and embarrassing information as a way of exercising vulnerability, as well as illustrates the hectic state of her material possessions as a result of not having a space of her own.
Alex Guillen is an Austin-based artist working primarily in illustration, new media, printmaking, and sculpture. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Studio Art from the University of Texas at Austin. Guillen makes her pieces with a female audience in mind and strives for accessibility in her work. She achieves this by referencing popular culture and using iconic imagery that is easily recognized by a millennial audience. Guillen also utilizes humor in her work, sometimes as a way to deliver serious content more easily, sometimes to make the work more inviting and engaging. Most of her illustrative work explores notions of femininity and girlhood. She depicts situations that draw from her own personal experiences – the rituals that come along with being a teenage girl, the conversations that most women inevitably have about their existence, the icons and tools girls are constantly surrounded by. Despite mainly working from personal experience, Guillen aims to be inclusive and intersectional, tying back to her goal of making work the audience can connect with.
