Daniela Rivera
Illustrator
Florida-born Daniela Rivera is a visual artist who enjoys communicating with various languages of mediums but currently within graphites and charcoal. She spends her days working in galleries at FAU, where she has experience utilizing leadership and groundbreaking research within the collections department, as well as hands-on experience getting her hands dirty during peak production season.
The industrious FAU Bachelor of Arts senior has previously exhibited research in the Ritter Art Gallery, testing the limits of AI in assisting in provenance research for under-documented African and Oceanian artworks within the teaching collection. But when it comes to her personal body of work as an artist, she likes to spend time reimagining canon narratives of historic romantic art movements that have subconsciously fetishized the demise or abuse of women.
Using the black and white mediums of graphite and paper, she perceives the mixture of Victorian literature and the appeal of inverting the narrative of the passive woman as an influential means to explore contemporary conventions.
Daniela's Gallery
Artist Statement
The popular canon in dark romanticism and gothic literature inspires Daniela's art. Framing the female demise and suffering as an idealisation of passivity and sensuality, fetishizing the
voiceless woman for the pleasure of the male dominated field of writers. With this poeticized
tradition, she inverts the narrative into the dominant woman and the passive man, a commentary on what was considered hedonistic and romantic for dark romantic enthusiasts. Using large scale paper, she employs representational figures in drawing, combined with decisive and intuitive markmaking, to shift values and incorporate Gothic elements such as deteriorated architecture, Victorian motifs, and awe-inspiring mortality, while balancing the discomfort of sitting in unconventional narratives. Created by charcoal backgrounds and finely drawn gestural figures.
Daniela strategically incorporates the "cliche" of a strong, manipulative, mysterious woman
rather than the sensualized damsel in distress. To avoid falling into a flat, stereotypical plight, she incorporates vitalizing, surreal elements of symbolism, persuaded by the complexities of human nature, masked in intricate compositions. Each piece invites reflection on the human condition, and has a delicate balance between presence and absence, form and feeling, canon and contentious.