NATURE'S TRANSMUTATION
Blender & Maya, 2022
VANESSA RIVERA
ARTIST STATEMENT
Nature’s Transmutation explores the seductive qualities of nature in correlation to the eroticness of human nature. Inspired by the erotic captures of Mapplethorpe’s flower photographs, Nature’s Trasmutation explores the concept similary through a digital realm and how the digital transforms the perception of identity through a virtual environment. The male form is less frequently evoked by artists through nature. It puts to question why the female body and flowers are vast in the history of art, but not the masculine. Like Mapplethrope’s flowers being an extension of the sensual forms, the digital can extend as reflections of ourselves and how fluidity of identity can exist in the digital, by utilizing the human body to juxtapose the lewdness nature exudes and how they can coexist. The freedom of the digital can explore this. Like all plants, there is the scientific basis that they can attract and reproduce and Mapplethorpe challenges this phenomena with his physical captures of nature’s eroticness that closely resemble the human nature of attractiveness and reproduction. So if all plants have it, and all humans have it, why can’t both the feminine and masculine seductive nature be viewed in the same manner? Why does femininity have more gaze than the masculine? Why can’t the masculine embrace the feminines of nature and vice versa?
ARTIST BIO
Vanessa Rivera is best known for her virtual 3D models and environments using vibrant colors, abstractionism, fluidity, and a hint of surrealism to create visual and emotional excitement. She doesn’t strive for interpretation but instead bridges between reality and the unconscious by combining organic qualities with metallic, holographic, glowing qualities to visualize how nature may feel but doesn’t exist in reality. Vanessa’s works consist of nature’s forms in both a realistic and geometric sense. She creates elements we recognize as nature in combination with elements that aren’t recognizable in nature, but through textures, animations, and color transforms the geometry into nature’s aura. She explores the elements of shapes and realism to create images that bend past reality and into a familiar, yet also distant realm that captivates, lures, and explores.
