Bio:
Daniela Riojas is an interdisciplinary artist from the U.S. - Mexico border, now working and living in of San Antonio, TX. She specializes in performance, photography, film, installation, and music. Her work explores themes of reconnection to indigeneity, ancient ritual, de-colonization, rediscovery of feminine archetypes, Native and Jungian philosophy, and investigation of the self. She studied English-Creative Writing at The University of San Antonio, TX and also attended the Vermont Studio Center Residency Program in the winter of 2013. She is a Surdna Foundation grant recipient, a former artist-in-residence at the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center through the Artist Lab Fellowship Program, and was awarded a grant for Media Arts from the Cultural and Creative Development Department of the City of San Antonio through the Artist Foundation in 2015. Daniela's films, performance installations, and self-portraits have been curated across the US. Most recently, she has been curated into the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach, California in an exhibition entitled Extracorporeal opening March 2018. Daniela is the lead singer and composer for Latin alternative band, Femina X.
Artist statement:
I am interdisciplinary artist currently based out of San Antonio, Texas originally from the US-Mexico border. My creative body of work recalls ancient ritual practices that engage in anachronistic couplings of pre-colonial world concepts and contemporary cultural theory. Throughout my process, my corporeal presence attempts a locative terrestrial engagement for the sake of performance narratives, drawing on historical records of a land and using my body as a canvas to express personal anecdotes and/or socio-political commentary. Using my process of, “individuation through embodiment,” developed through studies in Jungian philosophy, I physically place myself in a mode of abstract worship as a way to connect to indigenous deities, totems, archetypes, and new mythic characters. I capture this process through self-portraiture, performance, installation, and video. The images and performances become vehicles for remnants of a lost spiritual history. Bringing them to the forefront of contemporary art likewise brings along education about pre-colonial mythologies, which can help reconstruct a cohesive and collective consciousness free from the imposition of imperialist dogma.