Alexandra Diez de Rivera

My practice looks at the vacant space, the empty shell, the skin of things and is informed by my cultural heritage and research around the subject of aura in art. I explore themes of memory, mortality, and identity through emotionally charged and psychologically ambiguous objects and spaces that are imbued with history.

Through the use of photograms, large format film and digital photography, I evoke and explore corporeal presence. My subjects have an intimate, physical relationship to the body and have been handled and inhabited; they are inanimate but loaded, exposing the affecting remnants of past lives. The images of the children’s clothes are made without a camera, placing the antique garments directly on photographic paper and exposing them to light, the skin cells and body oils of their wearers seeping into the prints.

I use photography as a means, not only for remembrance, but as a method for preservation and restoration. The camera becomes an instrument for resurrecting archaic and obsolete objects, turning them into something new, allowing us to observe them and re-evaluate their cultural, religious, political, and sentimental meaning.

'The Whispering Gallery' and its dormant containers of rifles and pistols, crosses and medals, evoke hidden narratives and secret histories, the sense of absence and omission tapping into our deeper fears and desires. The objects and spaces photographed come from my own family home; like Nabokov in his autobiography, ‘Speak, Memory’, I use the family home as a space to excavate and animate the ghosts and auras of the past.