Carla Rippey is an American-born visual artist based in Mexico City. Her work seeks to expand the margins of drawing and graphics, applying strategies of appropriation, selection and edition. She works extensively from her collection of archives (images from photographs, postcards, family albums, newspapers, magazines, books and internet sources), which she translates into drawings, artist’s books and prints.
She was educated in Nebraska, La Sorbonne, Paris, The State University of New York and the University of Chile in Santiago. She was active in the feminist movement in Boston and in the Chilean left from 1969 de 1973 and has lived in Mexico since 1973. In the 70s she took part in founding the Infrarrealist literary movement and participated in the Mexican artists’ movement “Los grupos” as a member of the artists’ collective Peyote and the Company.
She has had, among others, individual shows in the Museum of Modern Art, Mexico, The National University Museum “El Chopo”, the National Print Museum, the galleries Arte Mexicano and Arróniz Arte Contemporáneo in Mexico City, as well as the Graphics Institute of Oaxaca, Seguela Gallery in Guangzhou, China, and the Mavi Museum in Santiago, Chile. Her recent group shows include Radical Women, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles and the Brooklyn Museum, NYC, 2019; Open Graphics:Expansive Routes in Mexican Graphics, Arprim, Centre d’essai en art imprimé, Edificio Belge, Montreal, Canadá, 2018; Latin Fire: Other photographs of a Continent, Photoespaña 2015, Madrid, and Distant Star / Estrella Distante: an exhibition organized around the writings of Roberto Bolaño, Regen Projects, Los Angeles, CA / Galería Kurimanzutto, CDMX, 2011.
She was Director of the National School of Painting, Sculpture and Printmaking “La Esmeralda” in Mexico City from 2013 to 2017. Since 1997 she has been a member of the Mexican arts grant system (Sistema Nacional de Creadores) and has been a member of the National Academy of Arts, Mexico since 2018.
Immolation, 2009-2019
Artist statement (short):
“I started collecting images and working from the resulting archives in the late 1970s. One of the subjects that emerged with time was that of fire: the act of burning registered in reiterated images clipped from newspapers, magazines and later on, downloaded from the internet.
Starting around 2010, I made a series of pieces with the archive’s fire images called Immolation. Fire seemed like the ultimate manifestation of uncontrolled energy, energy gone bad. Besides, fire burns the eye – it has an enormous visual impact.
Most of this work was done a few years ago, and now we live in an age of continuous devastating fires, fires that threaten the planet, or at least our existence on it. My small fires were prescient of an ever-expanding, consuming wave. I hope that somehow with our work we can do more than bear witness – we must fight fire with fire.”
Carla Rippey
Carla Rippey
Born Kansas, 1950
Nationality: Mexican
Lives and works in Mexico
Prix Pictet Fire
May 26 – October 15, 2023
Fotografiska Museum New York
281 Park Ave S, New York, NY 10010
https://www.fotografiska.com/nyc/
Prix Pictet
https://prix.pictet.com/
