Javier Téllez

Téllez has spoken about attending carnivals at the hospital—known for its progressive, alternative treatment methods—where patients and psychiatrists would switch uniforms to symbolically invert their stereotypical, daily roles.

[8] Javier Téllez is widely known for his films which feature patients from psychiatric institutions, thus allowing traditionally marginalized groups of people the power to narrate their own stories.

[10] Téllez's work with psychiatric patients grapples with issues of otherness, specifically how poverty, social class, and gender have influenced treatment, popular perception, and representation of mental illness.

1 Contemporary Art Center and Liftoff (2001), Téllez has constructed large scale birdhouses which entrap the viewer and serve as a subtle reference to Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

[4] In a 2004 exhibition at The Bronx Museum of the Arts, Téllez constructed a large scale, plywood birdhouse with over a hundred white whiffle balls hanging from the ceiling in randomly arranged clusters.

[8] The whiffle balls, commonly popular bird toys, are a subtle reference to Kesey’s work, while also serving to represent stray thoughts confined in a cage-like cranium.

[9] Expanding on the idea of entrapment, his 2001 Choreutics installation included a giant spider web in the form of a fish trap, and Calligari and the Somnambulist (2008) was projected in a room constructed of chalkboards.