DANIELA RIVERA

Fragmentos para una historia del olvido/ Fragments for a history of displacement (2018-19)

Work / Fragments for a history of displacement

Work / The Andes Inverted

Shooting Skies, 2014 Daniela Rivera’s interest in the accidents which can occur while painting began early in her career. The notion of trauma and its unforeseeable quality have been present in her work since the post dictatorship period in Chile, where she graduated from the Art School in Santiago in 1996. The move to the United States allowed Daniela to move beyond those first years of practice and concentrate not only on the narrative aspects of the work and her personal history, but on the over arching concepts behind the work. Rather than telling stories through images, she became interested in materializing concepts in her work. The notion of trauma, its unpredictability, its lack of context and its aggressively transformative power became the focus of her formal explorations. In 2009, Daniela started working on a series of paintings titled Accidental Skies. She began by splashing or dropping different liquids over carefully prepared and painted surfaces. Her intention was to introduce chance over the deliberate and to abandon total control over the outcome and final product. The accident happened to the image without any warning, not allowing it to anticipate or adjust to the changes that came with this aggressive attack. The encounter with the reality of the physicality of the painting appeared as a perfect allegory for psychological trauma. All artifice or illusion proposed by the image collapses confronted with the spill of liquid sitting on top of the surface destroying any allusion to space or three dimensionality. Furthering this idea, this new series titled Shooting Skies is a commentary on the seductive and traumatic aspects of violence. By inserting the work into the discursive space of gun policies and politics in America, Daniela means to address these issues from an LaMontagne Gallery, Press Release

Work / Shooting Skies

Fatiga Material, 2011 Exhibition: Site-specific painting installation at the Boston Center for the Arts, Boston, MA I was invited by curator Liz Munsell to participate in “Close Distance,” a show that took place at the Mills Gallery in Boston. The group showcased the work of Latin American artists working in the Boston area. From the beginning of the project, we ran into the impossibility of finding a common voice and a unifying image. Fatiga Material (Material Fatigue) was a site-specific installation occupying half of the main gallery that attempted to comment on exhibition politics and the proliferation and abuse of cultural images taken out of context. My goal for this work was to turn the exhibition space into an images of the ruin of itself.

Work / Fatiga Material

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Work / Accidental Skies

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Work / Holbein Rug

Work / Accidental Memling Gul

Walking a-Long, 2009 Exhibition: Foster Gallery at Noble and Greenough School, Dedham, MA This painting installation is simultaneously an homage to and commentary on the 1969 piece A Line Made by Walking by artist Richard Long. The work also includes the largescale installation Broken-Line that was also created for the space. This exhibition was the first stage of an on-going project. Richard Long’s A Line Made by Walking exposed the origins of different bodily and temporal practices within art disciplines. The performative aspect of drawing, printmaking, painting, and sculpture, were recorded by the photographic documentation of Richard Long’s repetitive walk. A Line Made by Walking addresses time and space as creative tools in the making of the artwork. My first encounter with Long’s piece came many years ago when I was an art student. In addition to my excitement about how smart and poetic the piece was, I wondered about my position as its viewer. Authorship appeared exclusively reserved to the author as I, a viewer, was left completely outside the piece’s resolution. Was the written documentation of the performance enough of a participatory action to allow for physical presence to be part of the constitution of the piece? Some of these questions opened up the possibility of exploring this piece through a completely discarded mode for the materialization of ideas in Land Art as well as art in the post-studio era. I decided to make a comment on Long’s A Line Made by Walking through painting and simulation. In Walking a-Long I attempted to materialize these questions, explore possible solutions, and use some humor in my response to Richard Long’s A Line Made by Walking. The piece involved the creation of ninety-nine 2’x 2’ oil paintings that covered an extended area of the gallery floor and accumulated as towers in some areas. Each of the paintings was a straightforward representation of grass painted in an obsessive, labor-intensive manner. Some of them accumulated in small towers, groupings that exposed the constructive process of the images and their material quality, as well as showcased in a more evident manner the labor involved in the production of the pieces through a sort of survey on painting’s mark-making devices. In the show, visitors were invited to walk the straight line that separated the main sections of the piece bringing it into completion with their presence and action. After this first manifestation of Walking a-Long, I kept creating more grass paintings without knowing exactly where the piece was headed. Something about the viral quality of the piece in relation to its labor intensive and obsessive nature proved extremely seductive. The notion of landscape and its artificiality appeared as a core element in the development of Walking a-Long’s extension, Growth.

Work / Walking a-Long

Work / Growth

Work / Walls / Muros

Work / Tilted Heritage

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Work / Tilted Gallery

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Work / Tilted Room

In-case (Homecoming), 2008 / Exhibition: Neiman Gallery, Columbia University, New York, NY This work was my contribution to the collaborative exhibition “Lost in Your Eyes” at Columbia University’s Neiman Gallery. The show was organized by Paul Pfeiffer, who invited a group of 35 international artists to produce work around the subject of the Balangiga Bells. As a second stage, the project traveled to London in 2010 and was supposed to travel to the Philippines (but has not yet done so). My participation in this project was made possible thanks to a Wellesley College General Grant for Scholarly Activities. In-case (Homecoming) was my reaction piece to the Balangiga Bells and their history. Today the three Balangiga Bells are in the possession of the U.S. military. The Bells were captured as war trophies by the U.S. troops after the bombardment of Balangiga and the burning of its church during the Philippine-American War. The massacre of Balangiga occurred on September 29, 1901, as a response to an organized attack by part of Balangiga residents at the time. After this tragic event, the Bells became and are still today, symbols of independence and determination for the people of the small town of Balangiga and the country as a whole. Two of them reside in the Memorial Park of Warren Air Base in Wyoming and the others with the Ninth Infantry in South Korea. Since 1901, the Philippines has requested the return of the bells to the U.S. government. And even though during the Clinton administration there was an intention of returning them, the Balngiga Bells are still in possession of the U.S. Military. The project involved the construction of shipping crates and bronze point drawings. After learning about the history of these objects and their journey, I decided to build custom made shipping crates for each of the Bells. Based on the information available about their physical appearance, I commissioned the construction of these containers to a company specialized in shipping art objects and antiques. The shipping crates were made so that they could resist at least five trips and could be reopened and closed at least five times. My intention was to provide the shipping containers for the other works in the exhibition as the project moved from New York to London and finally to the Philippines. The bells, embodied in the pieces of all the artists in the show, would then make their symbolic journey back to Balangiga. After its New York debut in November 2008, the show opened in London in April 2010. Sadly there are no immediate plans to have it travel to the Philippines.

Work / Crates

Work / Project Drawings