About

BIO

Geraldo Mercado is an artist and filmmaker originally from Yauco, Puerto Rico. Prolific and influential in the performance genre, he has created over 200 unique performance art pieces since 2012.

His short film The Land Scape was part of El Museo Del Barrio’s 40 year retrospective show “MUSEUM STARTER KIT: Open With Care” in 2014. Geraldo’s first solo show In The Universes Where I Died was hosted by Animamus Art Salon in 2015. His second solo show …And What Will We Do When We Get There took place in 2016 at cloyingPARLOR. His latest solo show, also named In The Universes Where I Died, was part of The Exponential Festival in 2022.

Geraldo collaborated with Pixelated Girls Records to create the short horror film I Think I Just Watched One of Those Cursed Videos which premiered at Millennium Film Workshop in 2022. Their next horror film is set to be released in 2024.

Geraldo lives in New York City with his wife and two cats.

Artist Statement

I aim to create moments that feel truer than real life but flow between each other like dreams do. Just like dreams, my work is often playful and humorous but with the sense that there might be something scary happening just around the corner.

My performance art is physically intense, I’m influenced by the way that professional wrestlers are able to tell stories while being slammed onto the mat. I idolized punk rockers like Ian Curtis and Iggy Pop while growing up, and try to bring the same physicality to my live performances that they did. Like punk rock, my performance art is socially conscious and radically empathetic but very fast and very aggressive. My performances could be described as confrontational but I never create work intended to alienate, my goal is to bring people together with my performances.

The best way I can describe my early video art work is “menacing lo-fi landscapes”. I make sure to bring that same sensibility to the more narrative driven works I am currently creating with Pixelated Girls. Discovering horror movies when I was thirteen is what got me interested in making art in the first place. Horror is one of those genres that exists in the land of metaphor, just like performance art does, and my work in one genre influences what I’m doing in the other.