On View

Alyse Delaney

Santa Clara, Cuba

Multi-channel video captures a city and its inhabitants while also examining an outsider’s perspective of Cuban culture.

This photograph of a street shows a red fence, a light blue building with a four pane windows, and a beige building with a black lamp. A man rides a bike with a bag hanging down his back on a red bicycle. On the sidewalk in front of the beige building is a woman with brown hair wearing a white patterned sleeveless dress.
Alyse Delaney. Santa Clara, Cuba , 2017. Digital still.

This piece is a multi-channel video installation created on Delaney’s recent trip to Santa Clara, Cuba. Recognizing her privileged position as a tourist and observer, she recorded slow-motion footage out of the window as her group’s tour bus moved through the city’s narrow streets. The camera literally scans the city; flattening its architectural space and capturing fleeting exchanges between passersby. This heightened awareness of time and space positions the viewer as a voyeur: watching, objectifying, and consuming the city with his or her gaze. With the window functioning simultaneously as a portal and barrier between groups of people, the piece calls attention to and questions boundaries between resident and visitor, insider and outsider, the observed and the observer.


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About the Artist

Alyse Delaney is a multi-media installation artist based in Brooklyn, NY. Her work investigates relationships between place and memory, location and identity. She is interested in the power dynamics of seeing versus being seen, and often uses her work to examine her own position in the world in relation to others. She holds a BFA in Lens-Based Visual Arts from The College of New Jersey, and currently works for Princeton University’s Visual Arts program. Her work has been shown at galleries and museums throughout New York City and New Jersey.