Lela Amparo

Lela Amparo’s creative journey started with music. Born and raised in Tucson, Arizona, Amparo is a self-taught guitarist, but her love for music opened up two other fundamental routes for her artistic practice: film, photography and travelling. From Morocco to France, to Norway and Sweden, travelling and taking photographs became her passion. However, year after year, her collection of prints was sitting in boxes, unused, collecting dust; so in 2019, Amparo decided to give them a new life.

She started creating data sets of her own photography under thematic headings such as “Arizona sunsets” or “Norwegian forests” and an Artificial Intelligence (AI) model would feed her back her own re-composed images. Amparo describes the software as “cooking” her photographs: combining and mixing to reveal delightful visuals. Her images became combinations or conglomerates of blended photographs. One artwork can use up to 500 of her original photographs and her AI model then creates an archetype of sorts. Aware of AI’s fast growing technology, Amparo likes to use custom made versions of this technology for the aesthetics it can provide. Rooted in photography, Amparo’s practice is now firmly establishing itself in the field of digital art. This also led her to explore the possibilities of NFTs, keeping still her passion of analogue photography with producing prints. At the intersection of the tactile and the intangible, Amparo’s images are from places she’s visited, but have merged into new and otherworldly locations that do not exist. She is interested in the duality between the digital and the organic: deep purple, bright red, and green landscapes are a celebration of nature. Between experimentation and homage, Amapro’s works are grounded in her diverse heritage, concomitantly Native American, African American, Filipino, and Slovak. Her aesthetics also respond to her 1990s upbringing from vaporwave visual culture to BIT Rate effects. The glitch is celebrated and 90s grain is highlighted’ as I don’t know what relevance it has here.

More recently, Amparo has been delving even more into the idea of giving new shapes to old elements by reusing, re-hashing, or recycling her own AI creations. A limitless and eclectic exploration of technology and visuality.