Alvarez shapes these discarded items by painting them either white or black, creating a uniformity among them that helps the viewer to focus on each object’s weight, contours, and the emotions evoked. Although many of these objects are small enough to fit into the palm of your hand, his photographs are monumental in size.

The exhibition also includes an installation comprised of the objects that appear in the photographs on the walls, creating a dialogue between the objects themselves and their photographic representations. By focusing on discarded objects, Alvarez calls attention to what gets lost in our increasingly throwaway society

Philadelphia-based Jaime Alvarez’s work questions the world around us by addressing varying themes such as privacy, institutional design, concepts of time, memory and meaning, homogeneity, and as of lately, the using up of resources. The Puerto Rican-born Alvarez studied at the Rhode Island School of Design and received his MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art.