The dead hand of the past

Exhibition Dates:
January 16 - February 27, 2026

Opening Reception:
Friday, January 16, 2026, 5:00-9:00pm

Rivalry Projects is thrilled to present Dead Hand of the Past, our second solo exhibition with Buffalo-based artist Nando Alvarez-Perez. The exhibition will be on view from January 16 to February 27, 2026.

Produced over the course of the last year, the works in the exhibition move away from the stylistically uninflected lighting strategies of Signs of Autumn - his last body of work - towards ones reminiscent of Italian horror films and sci-fi neo-noirs. These images are more iconic, more focused on a single object than in his previous body of work. Also included in the images are the materials Alvarez-Perez relies on to point at changing modes of industrial and artistic production over time—steel, marble, computer chips, money—as well as “low” cultural stand-ins for “high” cultural ideas, and, here, rather trickily lit pages from Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, which has been an important intellectual influence of late.

The title for the exhibition is taken from the work of sci-fi writer Kim Stanley Robinson, who writes in The Ministry for the Future, “The dead hand of the past clutches us by way of living people who are too frightened to accept change.”

WORKS

Installation ImageS

coming soon…

About the Artist

Nando Alvarez-Perez (b. 1988) investigates the individual's relationship to the vast territory of history. He received a BA in Film studies from CUNY Hunter in 2011 and a MFA from SFAI in 2014. Alvarez-Perez has exhibited at Lydian Stater Gallery, NY, NY, Buffalo Central Terminal, Buffalo, NY, Interface Gallery, Oakland, CA, Silver Eye Center for Photography, Pittsburgh, PA, Untitled Art Fair, San Francisco, CA, and Material Art Fair, CDMX, among many others. Alvarez-Perez was a resident of Lightwork, Syracuse, NY in 2022. His practice extends to his work as a founding director of The Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art, an art and education non profit that models how culture can sustain communities through focused, practical engagements with contemporary art, and as editor-in-chief of Cornelia, a visual art review published three times a year for the Western New York and Southern Ontario region. He is a visiting professor at Alfred University, living and working in Buffalo, NY.