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We're proud to present this special online viewing room to highlight Karen Miranda Rivadeneira's new series "MEDA" - the gallery exhibition of these works runs through June 30, 2021.
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MEDA
The New Series Imagining The First Woman
Karen Miranda Rivadeneira‘s new series MEDA - photographs, silkscreens, and paintings – is the result of her investigation into the primordial relationship between humans - The First Woman - and the earth.
Informed by Mesoamerican legends and myths, Rivadeneira captures bodies of women in close contact with rocks, grottos, dry hills, and ancient trees. In these figures against landscapes of New Mexico and those of her ancestral land in Ecuador, darkness and light, heat and cool, tenderness and roughness, permanence and transience intersect magically.
The Calling, 2018 Archival pigment print from a large format paper negative
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Mud Woman, Spider Woman, Stardust Woman, White Calf Woman
Rivadeneira's MEDA visually recounts the First Woman's chronicles, from her fall from the sky to her new home on earth.
"Throughout MEDA, Rivadeneira shows the Sky Woman performing a range of "agile acts" that reclaim the earth and fight against erasure. In the black-and-white Mud Woman Gazing, the descended Sky Woman has become the Mud Woman as she stands on rocky terrain, nude except for a layer of drying clay, and stares into the distance. Has she just landed here from her free fall and is she gazing upon her new, strange home? The woman and the landscape become linked; she looks like a moonlit version of the rock. Clutching her chest, she signals her self -protection, and the swirls of mud on her skin resemble ciphers, "Ikinaja cha makuinu" (We came to dream, they say)"— an excerpt from Yxta Maya Murray's text, Karen Miranda Rivadeneira "The Sky Woman" in Aperture Magazine, Fall 2020.
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Currently On View
At MIYAKO YOSHINAGA, 24 East 64th Street, New York City
Opening Hours:
Wednesday - Saturday 11 am - 6 pm
Monday and Tuesday by appointment
Through June 30 (Closed May 29 for Memorial Day Holiday)
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Video Presentation
Karen Miranda Rivadeneira, New York City, 2020Enjoy the spiritual atmosphere of Karen Miranda Rivadeneira's art practice. She invites you into her daily life in New York City as she contemplates the regeneration of her community. Everything from morning rituals to choosing materials for her photographs and paintings is connected to the Mesoamerican heritage that empowers her mind and body. For her recent MEDA series, she reenacts the legends of the first human woman amid primeval landscapes of rocks and caves.
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Available Work in "Meda" Series
Please inquire availability -
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The Techniques
Rivadeneira paints her visions using a variety of photographic techniques. She photographs her subjects with a large format camera and uses both an old-fashioned paper negative process favored by master photographers such as William Henry Fox Talbot and a modern color film process.
Whereas large format color film negative achieves a sharp and detailed image, that negative printed on paper gives creates the option to produce a more ethereal image with a very visible grain. Other techniques, such as long exposure, printing with special pigments, and digital composite allows her to explore a more ethereal realm. Using soft contours and blue tint tones, her female subjects evoke Victorian paintings as well as the pictorialism and cyanotype images of the early days of photography. -
Other Works
click image for details-
1000 Ceder, 2019Archival pigment print from a large format paper negative30 x 24 in
76.2 x 61 cmEdition of 7CLICK for Details -
Gathering Roots and Holding Up the Sky, 2019Archival pigment print from a large format paper negative38 x 22 in
96.5 x 55.9 cmEdition of 7 plus 2 artist's proofsCLICK for Details -
8 Feet Walking, 2019Archival pigment print from a large format paper negative16 x 20 in
40.6 x 50.8 cmEdition of 7 plus 2 artist's proofsCLICK for Details
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Bisti DeNaZin, 2019Archival pigment print from a large format paper negative30 x 40 in
76.2 x 101.6 cm
Edition of 7 plus 2 artist's proofsCLICK for Details -
Clavicules, 2018Mineral pigment on paper38 x 24 in
96.5 x 61 cmCLICK for Details -
Ice Crown, 2018Archival pigment print from a color film negative and a large format paper negative40 x 30 in
101.6 x 76.2 cmEdition of 7 plus 2 artist's proofsCLICK for Details
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Ix Balam I, 2019Archival pigment print from a large format paper negative40 x 30 in
101.6 x 76.2 cmEd. of 7 plus 2 artist 's proofsCLICK for Details -
Mud Woman Gazing, 2019Archival pigment print from a large format paper negative30 x 24 in
76.2 x 61 cmEdition of 7 plus 2 artist's proofsCLICK for Details -
Ollin Mecatl II, 2018Archival pigment print from a color film negative30 x 40 in
76.2 x 101.6 cmEdition of 7 plus 2 artist's proofsCLICK for Details
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Artemisia , 2019Archival pigment print from a large format paper negative30 x 24 in
76.2 x 61 cmEdition of 7 plus 2 artist's proofsCLICK for Details -
Sentinel, 2018Archival pigment print from a large format paper negative40 x 30 in
101.6 x 76.2 cmEdition of 7 plus 2 artist's proofsCLICK for Details -
Sentinel Gathering, 2018large format paper negative40 x 30 in
101.6 x 76.2 cmEd. of 7 plus 2 artist proofsCLICK for Details
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Stardust Woman , 2019Archival pigment print from a large format paper negative30 x 40 in
76.2 x 101.6 cmEdition of 7 plus 2 artist's proofsCLICK for Details -
The Calling , 2018Archival pigment print from a large format paper negative40 x 30 in
101.6 x 76.2 cmEdition of 7 plus 2 artist's proofsCLICK for Details -
White Calf Woman, 2019Archival pigment print from a large format paper negative40 x 30 in
101.6 x 76.2 cmEdition of 7 plus 2 artist's proofsCLICK for Details
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Karen Miranda Rivadeneira
About the Artist
Karen Miranda Rivadeneira (Born in New York City, 1983) was raised in both the United States and Ecuador. She earned her BFA from the School of Visual Arts and holds a post-graduate degree for her studies in photography at the Danish School of Journalism. Nominated for Prix Pictet in 2019, her work has been exhibited in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, SC, the United Nations, and the Photographic Museum of Humanity, among others. She has been an artist in residence in the US, France, and Italy and has taught photography at the California Institute of the Arts and the City University of New York. Rivadeneira has received multiple awards and fellowships including the Photographic Fellowship at the Musee du Quai Branly in Paris, the New York Foundation for Arts Fellow in Photography, and the Individual Artist grant by the Queens Council of the Arts. Her first monograph Other Stories/Historias Bravas was published in 2017 by Autograph ABP. Her work was featured in the Native America issue of Aperture Magazine (no. 240) last fall and was included in the book Latinx Photography in the United States by Elizabeth Ferrer published this year in January.
