Guillermo Riveros - The Embrace (From Sigh Oh Nara!)

Guillermo Riveros

I was born and raised in Bogota, Colombia. I studied visual arts at a Jesuit college before moving to New York and graduating as an illustrator. Through various creative and production processes, my work intends to elucidate sensual visions through the exploration of cultural and visual representation. I began to play around with the idea of self-portraiture after painting a series of fox heads depicting my seventeen-year-old self, right out of high school. I had intuitively begun an investigation journey by approaching notions of sexual stereotypes, and the critical analysis of my self-representation as a gay man. Through the study of memories, religious and occultist traditions, personal documentation, the school of television, my fascination with popular culture, cinema, and music, narratives and discourses began taking shape in my images. My work is a document of a performative enterprise. Fabricated or appropriated environments, costumes and constructed characters and identities collaborate to envisage rituals and interactions, while investigating social constructions and dynamics; reinforcing the idea that self-representation is part and the result of a mirror game. A mirror game between subjects, objects and their circumstances, which are created, identified and understood through reflection and projection. This makes a stage from which sexual/social identities can be fabricated and performed. Through my approach to self-portraits, I use myself as a mechanism that reveals some of these processes. These documents have taken the form of photographs, illustrations, texts, videos, performances, happenings and installations.