Doris Rivera
Goes good with coffee
November 9- December 2, 2023
In her first institutional solo show, Doris Rivera pulls a selection of things from her mother’s china cabinet and reproduces them in absurd parodies of monumentality. Such a cabinet and its interior curation is a fixture in the immigrant household, with its collection of unused dinnerware, souvenirs, and superfluous tchotchkes. This personal lexicon and idiosyncratic approximation attempts to replicate the vision of the American material homescape. The inevitable difference that occurs betrays the collector and further distances her from the image in which she copies. As inherent in mimicry, coming closer to things often only shows us how far away they still are from us (Bill Brown, Things (The University of Chicago Press, 2004), 6).
The series of sculptures involves a two-fold process of a material perversion and shift in scale from which emerges an irreverent attitude towards internalized expectations of American accumulation culture. These soft recreations in wool provide a startling textural transformation that brings the objects’ thingness into sharp relief: for a thing is both boldly encountered yet also not quite apprehended (Brown, Things, 5). Situated between farce and affection, Rivera’s sculptures double the gratuitous life of things as they formulate abstract maxims of the Occident.
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Doris Rivera lives and works in Los Angeles. She received a B.F.A. in Ceramics from California State University, Long Beach and an M.F.A. in Art from the University of California, Irvine. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at Phase Gallery, Modest Common, and Kleefeld Contemporary in Los Angeles.
