GEO/MATRIX Miguel Rivera’s solo exhibition 09.13.19 / 10.18.19
Studios Inc Studios Inc provides studio space, professional development, networking, and exhibitions for mid-career artists in Greater Kansas City. We engage the Kansas City community through our Exhibition Series Program, which exhibits resident artist works throughout the year, free to the public
Launched in 2003 to serve mid-career artists, Studios Inc is Kansas City’s nonprofit arts organization that offers pivotal three-year residencies to mid-career artists who are poised to significantly expand their careers in accordance with the career goals articulated in their residency application. Its competitive application process, sharp focus on career advancement, and commitment to serve the under-served population of mid-career artists set Studios Inc apart from other artist-support organizations.
Studios Inc offers a unique immersion experience for resident artists, who use their studio and exhibition space to produce and exhibit work, network and learn from one another, and attract and cultivate relationships with art patrons, collectors, and arts professionals.
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GEO/MATRIX
Artist Statement
My current work is a result of a search for new forms and complex paths embedded in the theory of metaphysics or abstraction from a baseless reality. I am reinventing structures and routes that stem from one’s daily life such as maps, the magic of belief in forces of physics, and architectural forms from baroque church facades. Layers of signifiers appear and disappear as if I am seeing dormant memories.
This work is the result of my current time and place where I am coming to terms with my ideological art discourse by being an artist of Mexican origin - not dealing with identity political art. Forms and colors come first to tell my version of my cultural education of being an outsider and slowly adapting to my adopted environment. Drawing follows hidden structures as landmarks of experiences that come back or fade away, leaving the graphic nature of contour drawing.
This body of work titled Geo/Matrix has evolved into layers. It is a progression of manipulated photos, hand drawn images, painted or printed shapes, and vector drawings that become edited by the destructive nature of laser energy. This act of self-editing these images results in a by-product that resembles one of questioning my own values - thus creating a re-birth of the original graphic medium. Margot Lovejoy used the term “Information as Simulation” to describe Jean-Francois Lyotard’s ideas to dissolve the basic nature of the object into other states of energy. These works aim to be a time capsule of that action. Furthermore, abstractions are simplified from photo memories in Venice, Buenos Aires, Hong Kong, Guanajuato and the US and from vintage maps from the colonial era.
Facades and maps from these locations have become the foundation or background graphic images, later to be modified with the integration of viral bacterial imagery and colonial map route patterns as added layers. Lastly, a burned drawing using a laser on paper or a CNC (Computer Numerical Control) drawing makes a symbolic and significant statement of this erasing and editing of my images.
Miguel Rivera: GEO/MATRIX
Article from KC Studio, written by James Martin
As Miguel Rivera winds up his three-year residency at Studios Inc., he departs on a high note with his solo exhibition, “GEO/ MATRIX.”
Rivera began his tenure as the chair of the printmaking department at the Kansas City Art Institute in 2008. Since then, he has exhibited at the Mexican Consulate in Kansas City, the Kansas City Artists Coalition, Cara and Cabezas Contemporary (now defunct), the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Todd Weiner Gallery, and Weinberger Fine Art, which represents him currently.
The artist’s densely layered works often address themes related to migration, incorporating imagery from maps, constellations, art history and medicine, especially images of viruses.
Much of the “GEO/MATRIX” show stems from Rivera’s 2018 residency at the International Printmaking School in Venice, Italy.
The engrossing, multilayered eight-panel work “Cannaregio” refers to the eponymous district in Venice where the artist’s studio residency was located. In the background, Rivera utilized woodcut to create a whorl-like black-and-white image of a virus. He then used a laser cutter to remove sections of the whorls, resulting in eye-catching textures and patterns. Images taken from Albrecht Dürer’s “Samson Rending the Lion” woodcut also appear in the background of “Cannaregio.” The middle ground of the work features a meandering line that resembles a coastline on a map. Slashing diagonals and pendulous curves in the foreground impart energy and movement and perhaps illustrate Rivera’s contention “Nothing is straight in Venice!”
The artist’s interest in the history of viruses was one of the primary inspirations for his Venice residency. The Black Plague swept through the city in 1630, and Venetians built the Basilica of Santa Maria della Salute afterward to celebrate the end of the outbreak. Rivera commemorated his study of this history with the large multi-panel work “La Salute.”
Smaller scale works in the show also appeal. A suite of four sumptuous mixed-media works on wood panel utilize GPS coordinates as titles, such as “21.0190 N, 101.2574 E,” which corresponds to Louang Namtha, Laos. Relatively spare monochromatic works of paint and black toner pack a lot of action into a small space.
Snippets of figures by Albrecht Dürer appear not only in the monochromes and in “Cannaregio,” but throughout the backgrounds in this body of work. They may stand as personifications of Western civilization or of the church. If so, then Rivera’s use of virus imagery seems to connote the decimation of indigenous populations through diseases spread by colonists.
The work that may address colonization most directly for Kansas City viewers may also be the most personal to Rivera. Imagery in “In Between WPWW” refers to the Oregon Trail, which began in Independence, Missouri, and ended in northern Oregon, passing through parts of what is now Kansas City and northeast Kansas. The work’s looping forms suggest movement, while its linear arrangement brings to mind trail maps of the U.S. westward expansion. At the exhibition’s opening reception, the MythScience Trio performed a lively composition for clarinets inspired by this work, written by Rivera’s KCAI colleague Dwight Frizzell, joined by Thomas Aber and Michael Miller.
Rivera seems to empathize with those displaced by migration. He was born in Mexico but received his BFA from Southern Oregon University and his MFA from West Virginia University.
He states, “I’m neither Mexican nor American. I’m my own thing. I’m a naturalized American citizen — my wife is American — who doesn’t fully fit in either in the U.S. or in Mexico.”
Apart from addressing compelling themes, Rivera’s show affirms the ongoing importance of the Studios Inc mission and its crucial place in the Kansas City-area art ecosystem.
The nonprofit mission of Studios Inc. is to serve mid-career artists by offering residencies and other programs to artists who “are poised to significantly expand their careers in accordance with the career goals articulated in their residency applications.”
According to Rivera, “GEO/MATRIX” is the most complex exhibition that he has mounted in Kansas City in terms of the scale of his work and in dealing with subject matter research.
Studios Inc. executive director Courtney Wasson notes “His current exhibition contains three large-scale works (the largest being over 6 feet tall by 14 feet wide), and his work is currently included in five exhibitions showing regionally and nationally with representation in both Kansas City and Seattle. It truly is a pleasure to see the impact that having time and space to create can have on an artist.”
Inertia
by Miguel Rivera
Mixed media print, drawing and laser engraving on arches paper
40 x 28 inches
Clear Segments I
by Miguel Rivera
Mixed media print, drawing and laser engraving on arches paper
44 x 28 inches
Clear Segments II
by Miguel Rivera
Mixed media print, drawing and laser engraving on arches paper
44 x 28 inches
Perpendicular
by Miguel Rivera
Mixed media print, drawing and laser engraving on arches paper
40 x 28 inches
Strata
by Miguel Rivera
Mixed media print, drawing and laser engraving on arches paper
40 x 28 inches
Testimony II
by Miguel Rivera
Mixed media print, drawing and laser engraving on arches paper
40 x 28 inches
Saint Augustine
by Miguel Rivera
Mixed media print and paint on wood panel
36 x 24 inches
Terra Nova
by Miguel Rivera
Mixed media print and paint on wood panel
13 x 16 ½ inches
Terra Firma (Homage to Venice)
by Miguel Rivera
Mixed media print and paint
on wood panel
13 x 16 ½ inches
Saint Sebastian
by Miguel Rivera
Mixed media print and paint on wood panel
36 x 24 inches
Orion
by Miguel Rivera
Paint, CNC engraving and toner
on wood panel
13 x 20 ½ inches
In Between VI
by Miguel Rivera
Paint, CNC engraving and toner
on wood panel
15 ½ x 11 inches
In Between VII
by Miguel Rivera
Paint, CNC engraving and toner
on wood panel
16 x 12 inches
In Between X
by Miguel Rivera
Paint, CNC engraving and toner
on wood panel
16 ½ x 11 inches
In Between XIX
by Miguel Rivera
Paint, CNC engraving and toner
on wood panel
14 ½ x 12 inches
Cannaregio
by Miguel Rivera
Mixed media print, drawing and laser engraving on arches paper
80 x 112 inches
Della Salute/ De la Salud/ Of Health
by Miguel Rivera
Mixed media print, drawing and laser engraving on arches paper
80 x 168 inches
Della Salute/ De la Salud/ Of Health
by Miguel Rivera
Mixed media print, drawing and laser engraving on arches paper
80 x 168 inches
21.0190° N, 101.2574° W
by Miguel Rivera
Mixed media print and paint
on wood panel
17 x 24 inches
45.4337° N, 12.3404° E
by Miguel Rivera
Mixed media print and paint
on wood panel
24 x 17 inches
RA 17h 45m 40s | Dec -29° 0′ 28
by Miguel Rivera
Mixed media print and
paint on wood panel
24 x 17 inches
49.4521° N, 11.0767° E
by Miguel Rivera
Mixed media print and paint
on wood panel
23 ¾ x 16 inches
45.4434°N,12.3280° E
by Miguel Rivera
Mixed media print and paint
on wood panel
23 ¾ x 16 ½ inches
Miguel Rivera Miguel Rivera, Associate Professor and Chair of Printmaking, is a practicing artist who has had many solo and group exhibitions in Romania, Poland, China, Argentina, Mexico, Japan and the United States. Before joining KCAI, he was Chair of the Art Department at the University of Guanajuato in Mexico, where he also served as an Associate Professor of Printmaking and Computers in Art. He has lectured as a visiting artist in Argentina, Peru, Mexico and the United States, appearing at the Contemporary Arts Festival in Guanajuato, the Southern Graphics Council Conference and an alternative printmaking workshop at the second annual Art Students Conference in Queretaro.
He earned a BFA degree in printmaking and painting from Southern Oregon University in Ashland and an Associate Degree in printmaking from the University of Guanajuato. He also received an MFA in Visual Arts and Applied Media from West Virginia University. He has been a visiting artist in Italy, Mexico, Japan, US, Argentina, China and Peru.
His work is in museums and can be found in both university and private collections. His work is also now part of the Nelson-Atkins Museum permanent collection and the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art permanent collection in Kansas City, Missouri.
He has been a Board Member at the Kansas City Artists Coalition, KC Artists Inc Steering Committee Advisor and a former Board Member at Mattie Rhodes Center in Kansas City. He is a current Board Member at ArtsKC.
Studios Inc’s three-year residency program provides a unique immersion experience that allows mid-career artists to use their studio space to conceptualize, produce, and exhibit their work.
With support from the Neighborhood Tourism Development Fund, Studios Inc serves the Kansas City Community and Crossroads Arts District by oering a free, open-to-the-public exhibition series throughout the year, which includes opening receptions, First Friday receptions, artist talks, regular gallery hours, as well as scheduled tours and events. It is our hope to showcase and promote high-quality, interesting artwork to both visitors and members of the Kansas City community.
Courtney Wasson, Executive Director
courtney@thestudiosinc.org
thestudiosinc.org