Adrian E. Rivera
Nahualismo
Solo Exhibition
April 2018
Plexus Projects is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Mexican artist Adrian Rivera. Rivera’s new media art focuses on the reprocessing and segmentation of objects/people/images—whether it’s cultural relics, folk art, or nature. Rivera employs both traditional and digital fabrication processes including sculptural casting and dyeing techniques as well as 3D scanning and printing. Rivera lives and works in New York City.
His exhibition will be on view in conjunction with Greenpoint Gallery Night on April 20th from 6–9pm.
In Mesoamerican folklore, the nahual (na'wal) is both human and animal: A shapeshifter or a totemic animal guide that exists intertwined with an individual, living and suffering as their human counterpart does. Countless, are the visual representations of the nahual.
The enduring popularity of nahuales is perhaps borne of the ever-mutating, tricky understandings of the term itself—corrupted data processed through layers of misconceptions and mistranslations. Anthropologists and writers defined the nahual in a way that othered the indigenous communities it originated from. Alter-ego, trickster, smoking mirror, changeling, brujo, shaman, spirit.
In this show, histories and objects much like data are susceptible to corruption and manipulation. The information left for future generations becomes fact, and we become dependent on that very data to define the reality of the past. Animals, whose existence is preserved via taxidermy become physical errors. Folk art, arte popular, tourist keepsakes, products of the people… Masks imbued with sacred spirit, transform humans into beasts. These objects sit in our mother’s living rooms, they pile up in garages. Their entire form placed on a single flat plane, they are presented through the lens of machine-vision—their histories expanding, mutating, translating.
