Mix Messages
Ivan Rivera
June 1-16, 2018
Opening Reception: Friday, June 1, 7-10pm

Mix Messages is a survey of Ivan Rivera’s works from 2012-2018 and includes multi-media work from several series and several points of departure. 

Each painting in the encaustic and mixed-media series Memory Landscapes uses a photograph as a starting point, with consecutive pieces being created from the memory of the prior one. The works become increasingly abstract with each version, mirroring the devolving nature of memory.  

Inspired by the TV show with a similar name, the richly textured, mixed-media paintings in the series Toddlers with Tiaras are lush, ironic commentaries on our complex cultural relationship with pageantry and child performers. 

The painting installation -20 is a meditation on the tragic phenomenon of US school shootings and the relentless news cycle that renders the lives of individual victims into statistics at the service of political or economic agendas.

Mix Messages, the title series of this show, is an homage to the streets of Brooklyn where Rivera lives and works. Vinyl stickers, snippets of signage and graffiti-inspired motifs are combined with classical patterns and historical paintings to create new narrative compositions that imitate the accumulation and layering of graffiti in urban settings and the unexpected yet consistent narratives which seem to evolve organically when they collide.