PHOTOGRAPHY BY ADA RIVERA. LINGUISTICS OF THE LANDSCAPE. THE HEROIC LANDSCAPE.
By Milagros Bello, PhD*
‘Photographs cannot create a moral position, but they can reinforce one—and can help build a nascent one.’ Susan Sontag On Photography
Ada Rivera creates powerful photographs that resignify the linguistics of classical photography. Her photographs, focused on landscape as a genre, establish a game of symbolic references that lead to a critical reflection on nature. Her works, both in black and white and in color, show montages of opposing visual signs, of a landscape in apparent calm and harmony that hides and metaphorizes its crisis in heroic survival. The work shows generic landscapes, unidentified places of tropical references, common to all parts of the planet where the sun prevails as a mobilizing force of the wild fauna and the profusion of groves. In that landscape it shows sceneries that overflow in bucolic forces, – in its luminous sunsets, its flashes, backlighting and silhouetted forms – reminiscences of forgotten paradises, or dream wastelands. However, within this apparent visual harmony appear compelling assemblages, frontal wooden frames that are installed undaunted next to trees or exposed over the infinite panorama of a horizon. Is this nature befallen under the hand of men? In other photographs, there are no industrial assemblages on the landscape but there are superimposed geometries that enigmatically float in the clouds or frame over on the trees; they are geometric structures that the artist has intentionally created with software programs. Radial, crisscrossing rectilinear shapes, squares in movement, create centrifugal tractions, or reclusive quadrature forms, in tensional enclosures that interfere the organic sinuosity of the nature. In both cases, Ada Rivera’s photography resignifies the landscape genre, away from traditional transcription of reality, portraying a landscape as a space of confrontations, and a dwelling of discrepancies. The landscape in this contemporary photography is not a site of complacency and enjoyment but a besieged and captive terrain. Breaking with the melancholia of a romantic landscape, the artist creates a place of socio-anthropological reflections on nature and its regression in this era of the Anthropocene. In Rivera’s photography there are no visual narratives but metaphorical discourses towards a topology of a crisis in the arbitration of the landscape between survival and destruction. The landscape in Rivera’s images is a heroic visual entity that subsists in the collision of investment capital interests and the conscience for preservation, debating between erasure and permanence.
Rivera, in her prolific production, has greatly expanded her investigation of mediums to the point to originally adding to her photographic image, the use of neon lights in intercrossing geometric shapes, that superimpose over the image, creating remarkable luminous effects, locating her work into the most contemporary languages of Photography.
Rivera’s work is well established as an aesthetic body of work reflecting solid photographic achievements and skills, a singular way of landscape framing, well-balanced compositions, as well as an accomplished handling of lights, backlights and visual milieux with strong chromatics on the scenes, however, her true artistic contribution lays on Rivera’s envisioning of the landscape as a metaphor for our dealings with the planet and its perilous consequences.
Her work aligns with other voices of women photographers who consciously look at our earth’s current condition and its precarious future in the hands of a civilization project of dubious results.
*Ada Rivera was born in the city of La Vega, Dominican Republic, where at a very early age, she attended various disciplines including painting, sculpture, and music at the Palace of Fine Arts in her beloved town. He studied Design and Decoration at the University “Pedro Henríquez Ureña”, then traveled to Europe where he studied a degree in Fine Arts at the University of La Sorbonne in Paris, adding to this, studies of Painting at the Academy of the Grande Chaumiere. Later she moved to Italy where she continued to broaden her knowledge in Art History and Styles. Afterwards, he studied Art Curatorship at Saint Martin Lane School of Arts, in London.
This long journey through art, has led her to the world of photography, where she formalizes her lifelong passion for this discipline which seeks to share her perception of everything she has learned. Currently, she develops her photographic work focused on the uses of contemporary photography, including the use of neon added to the surface of the photographic work. She has developed a conceptual photography in which she directs her attention to the planet and the transformations of nature in contemporary industrial society.
Ada has participated in countless exhibitions, including two important shows in 2021, Cross Aesthetics and Concurrences/Oblique Views/Art Basel Season, curated by Dr. Milagros Bello at the MIA Curatorial Projects curatorial space in Miami. From September 1 to October 15, he participates in the X Edition of the International Festival of Photography and Video Photo imagen curated by Carlos Acero Ruiz at the Museum of Modern Art in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. She will soon exhibit at ARS Contemporáneo where he will continue to present his series on Nature in Captivity.
This long journey through art, has led her to the world of photography, where she formalizes her lifelong passion for this discipline which seeks to share her perception of everything she has learned. Currently, she develops her photographic work focused on the uses of contemporary photography, including the use of neon added to the surface of the photographic work. She has developed a conceptual photography in which she directs her attention to the planet and the transformations of nature in contemporary industrial society.
Ada has participated in countless exhibitions, including two important shows in 2021, Cross Aesthetics and Concurrences/Oblique Views/Art Basel Season, curated by Dr. Milagros Bello at the MIA Curatorial Projects curatorial space in Miami.
From September 1 to October 15, he participates in the X Edition of the International Festival of Photography and Video Photo imagen curated by Carlos Acero Ruiz at the Museum of Modern Art in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. She will soon exhibit at ARS Contemporáneo where he will continue to present his series on Nature in Captivity.
*Curator Dr. Milagros Bello holds a Ph.D. in Sociology with a doctoral thesis in Sociology of Art from Sorbonne University (Paris VII-Jussieu), Paris, France. Dr. Bello is an art critic member of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA). Dr. Bello has curated numerous shows in contemporary art locally and nationally. Outstandingly, in the context of the 59th Venice Biennale, she curated the exhibition “Americans. Current Imaginaries.” and gave a lecture at Personal Structures/Reflection, in the European Cultural Center, in Venice, Italy. She is an art writer for local and international art magazines, and a former Senior Editor of Arte Al Dia International art magazine. From 2000-2014, she has taught as professor of art in graduate and undergraduate levels at the Florida International University, Florida Atlantic University, Miami International University (The Art Institute/Miami), and the Istituto Marangoni/Miami. Currently, she is the director and chief curator of MIA Curatorial Projects in Miami, former Curator’s Voice Art Projects founded in 2010 in Wynwood Art District, Miami. Dr. Bello is an artist mentor and motivator of young emerging artists.
