In #7, From La Piedra Sustituta Series 2020, Sierra shifts the emphasis toward concealment as strategy. The body appears partially hidden, adopting the stone as shield rather than burden. This gesture reframes vulnerability as negotiation: protection becomes self-imposed before it can be externally enforced. The photograph advances Sierra’s ongoing inquiry into self-regulation—how individuals internalize surveillance and preemptively obscure themselves to avoid being “pointed at.” The aesthetic austerity intensifies the psychological reading, positioning the nude form between fragility and resistance.
Showing a body that is hidden is the aesthetic apology for the insane judgment that the artist himself has taken as an excuse for not being 'pointed at' or rather as self-pointing. The stone is taken by the body that is unprotected as a metaphor for the weakness that seeks protection, and the body is taken by the stone as a consequence of an insecure state, how can a stone take a body? If this is the one that "institutionally" does it.
A body study of concealment and symbolic protection within contemporary conceptual nude photography. Jose Sierra, 2020. Available at The Art Design Project, Miami Beach.
Body Study Photography – #7 From La Piedra Sustituta Series 2020
Self Portrait #7, 2020
From La Piedra Sustituta Series
Archival Pigment Print
Limited Edition
Unframed
Jose Sierra (b. 1991 in Cartagena de Indias, Colombia) obtained his Master in Fine Arts from the University Institute of Fine Arts and Science of Bolivar (UNIBAC) in 2012 with a body of work titled Anti-Personnel Grids, which has since exhibited in different locales of Colombia. Shortly after, he was commissioned by the Colombian Ministry of Culture alongside the artist collective Si Nos Pagan Boys to participate in an urban art exposition titled, La Muerte Se Va de Vacaciones (Death is Going on Vacation) that was executed as a reaction to the traditionalism of Cartagena. In 2014, he exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Cartagena and in La Presentacion Casa Museo Arte y Cultura. He then exhibited in the Cultural Center Ciudad Movil in 2016 with a body of work created in collaboration with the Colombian photographer, Camo. In the same year, he was nominated for the International Luxembourg Art Prize for his recent work Self-Portrait. Sierra’s ongoing body of work continues to be based around his self-representation from which he addresses a homoerotic gaze through the configuration of abject staged environments that he merges himself within as “a subject of aesthetic creation.”
