David Rios Ferreira: And I Hear Your Words That I Made Up

History is ever present throughout David Rios Ferreira’s work. Using source materials such as historical and botanical illustrations, comic books, and cartoon characters, Rios Ferreira’s dynamic mixed-media works conjure up a psychic landscape filled with conflicting emotions—grief and anger, but also longing and nostalgia. Colorful and chaotic hand-drawn interventions vie with appropriated images of slave ships and shackles, aiming to reconcile the bloody past with a complicated present and an unknown future.

In an attempt to both acknowledge the traumatic history of colonialism and imagine an alternate narrative, Rios Ferreira creates a world of mystical beings and bodies that cross barriers of gender, race, and time. Figures are bound, stretched, or densely layered; bits of collaged paper, acetate, and shards of color explode on the page. The work seems to be in perpetual motion—a hurricane casting debris everywhere. This visual turmoil echoes the experiences of cultures whose histories have been deliberately erased, but who refuse to be silent or still.

Rios Ferreira’s work allows space to consider issues of time, power, and representation. He asks us to meditate on the past and how it shapes identity, and also to consider possible futures in which the stories we hear, celebrate, and accept as truth are told by different voices.  — Sarah Freeman, Curator

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website.