Hybrid Quiddity

Engaging in the practices of drawing, painting, sculpture, installation and photography, Nina Rivera’s intent is to examine psychological conflation and the evolving relationships between embodiment, disorder, digital influence, and the absurd. As our climate conditions detrimentally mutate, whether social, environmental, political or economic, we have reached a point of existence within a void between a rich past with distinct identities and a volatile future guaranteed to inherit. Raised amid the boom of the world wide web, particularly social media, the subliminal shifts in societal functions abstracted by our integration with technology has remained at the forefront of Nina’s worldview.

The lens of posthumanism inspects our cybernetic fusion with regards to AI, contemporary internet culture, algorithms, late-stage capitalism, biotechnology, and the Anthropocene. The concept questions autonomy, power structures, and progress, proposing humans to no longer possess absolute dominion over nature, nor exist as a separate entity from the systems and machines we interact with on a daily basis. Drawing from feminist and postcolonial theory, posthumanism applies these frameworks to life in the digital age as its core foundation accentuates fluidity, hybridity, and the significance of marginalized perspectives within our techno-cultural futures. Prior to studying the theory, Nina Rivera developed an analogous perspective from a radical fluctuation between nihilistic and absurdist sentiment during my preadolescence. All factors considered, essentially, the foundation of their practice is to deconstruct the intersections of mental disorder and contemporary hazards of the human experience.

Ashley McNamara is a painter and furniture designer specializing in airbrush art (thanks to background in the automotive industry). Whether in paintings or in furniture design, her work examines the relationship between fantasy and reality. Ashley’s 3D work has been an exploration of the uncanny. Through working with wood, metal, bone, plastics, computer modeling, and specialty coatings, Ashley aims to create environmental pieces that invoke an otherworldliness, sometimes even by using coding and circuitry to make works come alive. In painting, Ashley likes to investigate the appropriation and reclamation of mythologies, creating works that explore the themes of the myths and folkloric archetypes with a modern lens. Bridging the gap between two dimensional and three-dimensional design is something she particularly enjoy, using 3D modeling, CNC, woodwork, welding, and airbrush art in the process