Semaphores from the Studio
Alejandro Tamayo’s The hand, the fingers and the reversed glove
By Emily McKibbon
From sender to recipient, 2025. Collected objects and wooden bases. One of three elements.
From sender to recipient (2025) (header image):
Bell, lighter, acorn, highlighter. Bell, lighter, acorn, highlighter. Bell, lighter, acorn, highlighter. Different bells, different lighters, different acorns, different highlighters. But all the same: Blah, blah, blah.
It’s so simple, really. Elegant, even. When you see the trick, you want to laugh. ***
Windsor ON – December 8, 2025 ​
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Part of the very real joy and pleasure of Alejandro Tamayo’s work are the ways in which he revels in and reveals every decision. There is nothing left to chance. Every exhibition has the roundness and the unassailability of a locked-room murder mystery. All the clues are there, with no dangling signifiers to confuse or mislead viewers.
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The hand, the fingers and the reversed glove is a solo exhibition featuring the work of Colombian-Canadian artist Alejandro Tamayo, presented at Artcite Inc., an artist-run centre in Windsor, Ontario, between October 3 and November 8, 2025. The exhibition is an exploration of language, archetypes and meaning. The project has its origins in an exercise Tamayo undertook, replacing each letter of the alphabet with a discrete object (bell for B, lighter for L, acorn for A and highlighter for H, as above). Each object is similar in scale— Tamayo notes that a table, for example, couldn’t be a T in a lexicon where a straw was an S—and sits neatly on shelves or blocks in the gallery space. Object labels are spelled out like concrete poems in type stamps on small sheets of paper, the word in vertical red and the objects in horizontal black. These “drawings” are nailed to the wall just far enough from the original work that you might struggle with putting them together.
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Which is not to say that these are the titles; no, that would be too easy. The spelled out words immaterial and invisible all form part of Meanwhile you’re looking at this work, some other people in the gallery might be looking at you (2025). Once again, Tamayo has landed a subtle joke: while you’re looking at artwork that points to its own evanescence, you yourself have coalesced as the subject of someone else’s gaze.
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Coming into and out of focus has always been a subject for Tamayo’s work. Much of his practice gently skewers the process through which an everyday item might be invested with the aura of “art,” and then afterwards lose it. Once Tamayo had selected the object that would stand in for a letter—such as whistle, for W—the task then became finding the one that would easily and only stand in for all such objects. So, for example, all the pink pearl erasers in this exhibition contain no trace of use, nothing to point to an individual biography or history. Somehow, each object in this exhibition appears only as type and never as token; there is a studied blankness to them that confounds and delights.
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Meanwhile you’re looking at this work, some other people in the gallery might be looking at you, 2025. Collected objects, wooden shelves and stamped drawings.
Meanwhile you’re looking at this work, some other people in the gallery might be looking at you, 2025. Collected objects, wooden shelves and stamped drawings.
Outside of the gallery is Extract from Lecture on Nothing. This is a sentence inscribed on a freestanding shelf on the wall, and it is given over to the audience who might leave something there to fill in a crowd-sourced alphabet. The items visitors leave are less reliable as archetypes than the ones that Tamayo has chosen. A clear gel-cap tablet becomes an A, for Advil, but it’s also P for pill, and I for ibuprofen; maybe even M for muscle relaxant for the athletes or the menstruates among us. The signifiers are slippery. Meanwhile, a dead bee is inexplicably an i—an insect—a genus not a species. The token tries to pass as type.
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At first, I didn't understand the difference between what is inside and what is outside the gallery; the strict taxonomy of the interior space vs the looser one that precedes it. And yet, they reinforce each other, demonstrating the ways in which Tamayo assiduously decides and then methodically operationalizes his decisions. The slightly anarchic decisions the visitors have made highlight the care and intensity with which Tamayo has made his: a hair for “H” and a pair of sunglasses for “S” don’t seem to occupy the same typographical universe, and besides, the hair—like the vulnerable, dead, dusty bee— refuses the impassivity so naturally assumed by Tamayo’s alphabet.
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It is ironic that abecedarian is a term used to describe items organized alphabetically as well as a novice learner. We know that modern alphabets originated as pictograms over 5,000 years ago, and that there are traces of it that yet remain. A, for example, comes from the Proto-Sinaitic script (1,800-1,500 BCE), which was eventually adopted and adapted by the Phoenicians (ca. 1,000 BCE), and if you imagine the letter rotated ninety degrees to the left, you can begin to imagine the ox head it originally described. Tamayo is an arch abecedarian in this project, reinserting the archetype into alphabetic form, and it is the visitors who reveal the significant conceptual labour that this involves. This is no novice effort; Tamayo’s success is in how inevitable it all seems, when you enter the space and discover it.
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(And the Cagean sentence he has handed over to the viewers in Extract from Lecture on Nothing?: “I have nothing to say and I am saying it.”)
Extract from Lecture on Nothing (detail), 2025. Wooden shelves with rubber stamped letters, donated objects. Participatory work.
Jump while looking at this work, 2025. Collected objects.
To enter into a dialogue with Tamayo or his work, one must enter an entirely different time signature. It is present as much in conversation with Tamayo as it is in viewing his work. There is not a question you can ask that he has not anticipated, and he is thoughtful, deliberate, and detailed in his responses. The clock slows with Tamayo. Everything Tamayo does is a decision, everything you see is the result of one, and yet nothing is overdetermined.
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There is one final work that bears mentioning in this exhibition, and it appears somewhat at odds with the other works on view. It is a small bar that suspends three sets of objects from three sets of red strings: a maraca, at the end of one; a group of marbles at the end of another; and the end of the final—well. A mysterious lumpen form, maybe rock, maybe rubber. Of all the items in Tamayo’s exhibition, this one feels magic, peculiar, even auratic. It is not a neutral stand-in for all others of its class.
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Of all the items sourced for this exhibition, this was the most elusive. It’s a meteorite—a piece of space rock that survived its journey through earth’s atmosphere, landing seven hundred years ago in China before somehow ending up here. Jump while looking at this work is both the title and the directive. There’s magic here for those who seek it.
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Emily McKibbon is an award-winning writer and curator of settler descent. Her writing has been published in The Malahat Review, Canadian Art, C Magazine, PRISM international, Room Magazine, The New Quarterly, BlackFlash, and other literary and arts periodicals. She has received numerous awards and recognitions, including an Honourable Mention for Best New Magazine Writer at the Canadian National Magazine Awards in 2015, a Pushcart nomination from Room Magazine in 2018, the Edie Yolles Research Prize from The Image Centre in 2020, and the 2021 Room Magazine Creative Nonfiction Contest. She is currently based in Windsor, Ontario, where she is Head, Exhibitions and Collection at Art Windsor Essex.
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Images coutresy of the artist
Visitor in front of Extract from Lecture on Nothing.