This week’s Artist Spotlight highlights the work of Zoe Alameda, a multidisciplinary artist whose practice navigates the intersections of material identity, digital culture, and self-perception. Currently featured in Manual Override at Good Mother Gallery, Alameda’s work captures the tensions between physical presence and virtual detachment, reality and reproduction, intimacy and distance.Born in 2000 and currently based in Los Angeles, Zoe Alameda creates work that excavates the fragile yet overwhelming visual culture of contemporary life. Sitting, scrolling, consuming—her practice reflects the experience of a world where images are ceaselessly produced, disseminated, and repurposed. Alameda’s use of painting, collage, sculpture, and found materials transforms familiar objects and ephemeral images into tactile, layered compositions, forcing a reckoning between what is seen, what is hidden, and what is forgotten.
Her work is informed by the over-saturation of digital imagery, particularly within the commercial and cultural landscape of Los Angeles. Rather than rejecting this visual overload, Alameda engages with it—manipulating Xerox prints, thermal labels, tattoo ink, silicone, and polyurethane foam to examine how identity is shaped, distorted, and mediated through material culture. By layering and obscuring, her compositions provoke a constant state of searching, compelling the viewer to question what they’re actually looking at, and whether the image is one of personal expression or mass reproduction.
In One Bad Apple (2025), Alameda constructs a fragile yet imposing interplay of stillness and disruption. At first glance, the piece presents a mundane scene—a parked car, a fallen apple precariously positioned near the tire. The image, printed on thermal shipping labels, is delicate and precise; yet the materials resist permanence. Thermal printing leaves no ink, only heat-activated impressions that degrade over time. Any attempt to print an all-black sheet would cause the machine to malfunction, so Alameda fills the negative space with scattered fragments of text, "Thank You Lord", a phrase at once deeply personal and mechanically reproduced.
Beneath this flickering, unstable surface, a hidden layer emerges—a hand tattoo, laser-printed on copy paper and tiled together beneath a transparent veil of tar gel. The thermal strips move with air currents, momentarily disrupting the static certainty of the image above and offering fleeting glimpses of the concealed composition below. This duality of exposure and concealment mirrors the hesitation and vulnerability of self-revelation—a push-and-pull between how much we show, how much we obscure, and whether true intimacy can ever exist in a world built on filtered projections.
Similarly, New Year’s Resolution (2024) extends Alameda’s interrogation of self-construction and material manipulation. Composed of tattoo ink, silicone, resin, polyurethane foam, Xerox prints, and BIC lighters, the piece fuses synthetic materials with personal artifacts. The act of tattooing—permanent, intentional, painful—is contrasted with ephemeral and disposable materials, suggesting a tension between the desire for lasting change and the transient, performative nature of resolutions in an era of curated digital identities.
The curatorial ethos of Manual Override explores the collision of mechanized processes, industrial materials, and human intervention. While the exhibition as a whole examines the integration of mechanical systems within contemporary art, Alameda’s practice highlights the mechanics of image-making itself; how we create, erase, and reassemble our visual and emotional identities.
By repurposing commercial printing techniques, industrial materials, and personal gestures, Alameda interrogates the authenticity of self-representation in an age of algorithmic curation. Her work challenges us to look deeper, to question whether what we see is an original imprint or a reproduced artifact, and to reconsider the ways in which we construct and consume visual culture.
In a world where images are endlessly copied, filtered, and recontextualized, Alameda’s work leans into the imperfections, the glitches, and the vulnerabilities, reminding us that meaning is often found not in the perfect image, but in the fleeting, imperfect moments of disruption
On View: January 18 – February 8, 2025
📍 Location: Good Mother Gallery, 5103 W. Adams Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90016
🕚 Gallery Hours: Wednesday – Saturday, 11 AM – 5 PM
For more information or to request a digital catalog of available works, please email info@goodmothergallery.com.
New Year's Resolution, 2024 by Zoe Alameda
One Bad Apple, 2025 by Zoe Alameda
