DAVID RIOS FERREIRA

As a teen, David imagined he would one day become an animator. While enrolled at The Cooper Union, he garnered interest in the trajectory of fine art.  “My eyes were opened to the power of manipulating a medium with intentionality—to explore research, content, and narrative in order create impact and dialogue.” For a long time he consumed himself making vide art, and eventually, forayed into drawing. To this day his hand rendered pieces  are infused with a unique sense of time and movement.  Attracted to lines, the meaning they carry and “how they interact and abstract” his  large-scale drawings on Mylar and paper amalgamate elements such as cross hatchings of 18 century newspaper etchings, 1930s political cartoons and  the broad and fluid lines of children’s coloring books. As of late, he’s rendering these forms in three dimensional space. In his recent sculpture Open our minds as we cast away, (2017) “clusters of black lines form a vessel one may identify as a merchant ship, a pirate ship, or slave ship. Animation stills merge with historical etchings and political cartoons—layers of history and sentiment clash to form a new body that lives in between time.” Where postcolonial imagery intersects with children’s pop culture, “Clusters of lines and layers of color dominate space, creating dense, hybrid forms,” explains David. Familiar characters like Astro Boy, Pinocchio and Peter Pan are deconstructed and reinterpreted to become temporal beings and transmitters of imagined histories. In this way, the works create their own hybrid realities, space between “a reality that signals how the body both bears and transforms historical memory.” Ferreira’s work stems from the artist’s practice of acquiring, appropriating and using language; drawing upon American history’s strategies of deculturalization the U.S. conducted on school children in Puerto Rico and other territories up until the 1950s. “Strategies my parents remember as nursery rhymes and school pledges.” Another vantage point of his work encompasses borrowing lines from cartoons in order to communicate to children on the Autism Spectrum, including his nephews, who rely on cartoons and animated films for their value as sources of language and communication. “Coloring books and animation, historical references, and other appropriated images are my ‘found objects’” says the artist.  “The tension between the object’s original meaning and what they are imbued with by being forced together coalesce into a study on identity formation—an investigation of race, nation, sexuality, and gender.” Ferreira currently works in New York, NY and Jersey City, NJ and will be showing new work in the Mirrored by Nature exhibition curated by Corrine Gordon at Welancora Gallery in Brooklyn, NY April 14 – June 17. He’s also debuting a suite of five letterpress prints that investigate the five Black and Latino youth of the Central Park Jogger case in New York City in 1989 and a large scale sculptural artist book incorporating plexiglass and overhead transparencies for the 2018 WORKSPACE ARTIST IN RESIDENCE exhibition at the Center for Book Arts will run from April 20 – June 20. He is in the midst of preparing for his first solo museum exhibition. Opening this summer, AND I HEAR YOUR WORDS THAT I MADE UP, will feature new large-scale drawings that investigate the content of children’s popular culture to shed light on the persistence of colonialist narratives in the mainstream imagination at the Brattleboro Museum & Art Center in Vermont (made possible in part by a National Association of Latino Arts and Culture Fund for the Arts grant). Check it out in late June.

http://davidriosart.com