Daniela Rivera

Descripción del Artista

Visual artist making work that attempts to understand the object quality of images. My paintings are usually site specific and react to the spaces of exhibition. I recreate utilitarian uses of painting, which alter representational and perceptual planes, to make the painting perform as the space and ask the body to assume the role of the figure of the painting. I am interested in working at the intersection of disciplines and opposing schools of thought. I believe my work tangos with the process of baroque painting techniques and the presentational strategies and formal undertones of minimalist art and some of the conceptual elements of Arte Povera, a fundamental contradiction but a world of possibilities for staging. Visual analysis is the driving force of my teaching. I love teaching and share with students the experience of making visible relationships that were previously invisible and not considered. I am committed to teaching form and content as a unit where meaning is always assuming a physical form. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Daniela Rivera received her BFA from the School of Fine Arts, Pontifica Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago (1996) and her MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2006), and was a fellow at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine (2006). She has been featured in solo exhibitions at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2017); the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo, Santiago, Chile (2012); LaMontagne Gallery, Boston; and the Davis Museum, Wellesley, MA (2010). She has also been included in group exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (2010, 2011). Rivera is currently an Associate Professor of Art at Wellesley College, where she has taught since 2008. Born the year of Augusto Pinochet’s seizure of power in Chile in 1973, Rivera’s coming-of-age was profoundly shaped by the ensuing years of military dictatorship, including the disappearance of activists and government critics. Her work is informed by the politics of repression that she experienced growing up in a dictatorship with a philosophy that the role of the artist today is to provide visibility to questions that may not yet have been asked or perhaps have been buried for a variety of reasons. When Rivera moved to Boston in 2002, she turned from painting to sculpture and installation. Daniela Rivera: The Andes Inverted, a 2017–2018 exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, resulted from research that Rivera undertook into an evacuated mining town on the edge of Chile’s Chuquicamata copper mine. Removing a section of the museum’s pristine walls to expose the building’s inner structure and installing a monumental sculpture of the Andes, the exhibition was both productive and destructive, additive and subtractive, which is how Rivera describes the long-term social and ecological effects of mining. Exemplifying Rivera’s architectural installations, The Andes Inverted surrounded its viewers in such a way that its references to mining, labor, and dictatorship did not seem far away, but instead urgent and ever-present.

Exposiciones en las que ha participado como artista

Poéticas Latinoamericanas: Joyería Contemporánea

Colectiva

Fragmentos para una historia del olvido / Fragments for a history of displacement

Individual

Daniela Rivera: The Andes Inverted

Individual

3 exposiciones