Today we’d like to introduce you to David Rios Ferreira.
Hi David, so excited to have you with us today. What can you tell us about your story?
As far as I can remember, I’ve always drawn pictures. My mother would have a small pad of paper and pens for me to draw while on train rides throughout New York City.
Whether we were running errands together or visiting family, I would pass the time drawing the people I saw on the train or the landscape outside the train car windows. This skill was always encouraged by both my parents and my older siblings, who would take me to art events and museums.
These experiences informed my focus on getting an art education. I attended the High School of Art & Design in New York, where I studied traditional animation in hopes of working in film and television.
But it was when I took free classes with the Saturday Program and Outreach Program at The Cooper Union, that my ideas of how I could become an image-maker broadened. Later, I would attend The Cooper Union for college working with artists like Walid Raad, Shelly Silver, Ernesto Pujol, and Rina Banerjee, who helped me hone my voice and develop a studio practice that was as personal as it was research-based.
For almost 18 years, I have kept professional studio practice where I create mixed-media drawings, installations, and sculptures. I merge historical etchings, political cartoons, and children’s coloring books to produce dense and abstract hybrid forms in my art. All this source imagery that I appropriate is deconstructed and reconstituted to become what I call “temporal beings”—beings that speak to this idea that we carry within our body’s personal and political histories.
For my exhibition at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts (UMFA) in Salt Lake City, titled Transcending Time and Space, I explore community art-making, imagined time travel, and spirituality as a vehicle for thinking about love, loss, and memory. I ask visitors to the ACME Lab gallery at UMFA to contemplate those we’ve lost, others we miss across distances or even people we have yet to meet and invite you to imagine gateways and portals through which we may connect and “reach” these loved ones.
The exhibition features a collection of abstracted drawings, collages, photographs, and videos representative of these gateways.
I was moved to create this work based on the ever-growing tragedy of missing and murdered Indigenous people—something I explore in collaboration with Denae Shanidiin and Restoring Ancestral Winds, a Tribal coalition responding to the violence perpetrated on Indigenous communities within the Great Basin and strengthening the traditional values of Indigenous relations.
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View the full interview at voyageutah.com