Daniela Rivera
Shooting Skies
On View: March 1st - April 5th, 2014
Opening Reception: Saturday, March 1st 6-8 PM
LaMontagne Gallery is proud to present Daniela Rivera’s newest work in the exhibition Shooting Skies.
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 aesthetic standpoint and in doing so, generate an experience that fosters dialogue around them.
Boston Globe review by Cate McQuaid, “Fading images leave lasting impressions”, March 18th, 2014
Daniela Rivera (b. 1973 in Santiago, Chile) lives and works in Wellesley, MA. She received a BFA from the School of FIne Arts Universidad Catolica de Chile in Santiago, Chile and an MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, MA. Her work was part of the continued James and Audrey Foster Prize exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, MA. Rivera has also shown at both the Davis Museum and Cultural Center in Wellesley, MA and at the LeRoy Neiman Gallery, New York, NY . Rivera has also exhibited at the Mills Gallery in Boston, MA and at the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo (MAC) in Santiago, Chile.