Celina Paiz is a multidisciplinary artist exploring the poetics of fragmentation, memory, and perception. Born in Guatemala City and raised in Florida, her work filters modern digital experimentation through the lens of cultural inheritance. With a foundation in Arts Semiotics from Brown University, Paiz built a career as a writer and filmmaker, co-writing, directing, and producing work that has screened at international festivals including SXSW, Locarno, and Clermont-Ferrand. Her writing has been recognized by The Black List for her pilot Sick Money and she has developed television projects for Netflix and Legendary Studios.
Her current visual practice merges process-based discipline with narrative sensibility, using digital and analog techniques to question authorship, emotional resonance, and the fragility of memory. Paiz lives and works in Austin, Texas, with her husband and son.
Currently Exhibiting in: Brooklyn, NY
Instagram: @celinaenlaselva
Featured Artwork at Bushwick Gallery
Title: Soul Wrestler (No. 3, 4, 7, 10, 40)
Year of Creation: 2024
Medium: AI-generated, poem-prompted, Polaroid transfer on watercolor paper
Dimensions: 6 x 6 in (each)
Edition Type: Unique, 1 of 1
Location: Brooklyn, NY
Price: $500 set
Description
Soul Wrestlers originated from an experiment in AI image generation, prompted by lines from Paiz’s poem Let the Golden Record Go—an homage to the Golden Record sent into outer space in a hopeful gesture of contact. Instead of clarity, the machine returned strange, disjointed, performative images, giving rise to a layered ritual of creation, destruction, and rebirth.
Each image was projected, captured on Polaroid film, submerged in water, and dissected into a fragile photographic membrane before being resurrected on watercolor paper. Many dissolved in the process. The surviving works are relics of poetic mistranslation: AI-born, analog-processed, and tenderly reclaimed by the artist’s hand.
The resulting images are both artifacts and questions. They hold the tension between machine and maker, between digital perfection and tangible imperfection, becoming visual evidence of wrestling something alien into something human.
Exhibition Information
Exhibition Title: Fractured Beauty: The Elegance of Imperfection
Curated by: Veronica de Oliveira Castro
Theme: This exhibition challenges the concept of perfection by embracing dissonance, flaws, and irregularity, capturing the allure of the broken, the incomplete, and the chaotic.
Exhibition Dates: October 23 – October 30, 2025
Opening Reception: Thursday, October 23, 2025 / 6 PM – 8 PM
Private Showings & Events: Invite-only throughout the week