Danica Ribi

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Exhibitions Images and Recordings: View.

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Recent Exhibition:

January 25 – March 1, 2025. Winter. Los Angeles (4478).

(paradise)

Sohyong Lee, Rudik Ovsepyan, Danica Ribi, santoni kina, Keywan Tafteh, Tiago Da Cruz

+ Reference: Checklist.

+ Release: File.

+ Press: This Week’s Must-See Art (Curate LA: February 20-26, 2025).

+ Exhibition Documentation : View.

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Bio

Danica is an interdisciplinary artist. Their recent sculptural works investigate identity and autonomy through examining dissociation—a site where constructs of selfhood dissolve—and we are offered a chance to recompose. What survives in the space between presence and absence? They combine readymades with created pieces to reimagine modes of operation.

Danica’s recent work with performance has given them a critical outlet to recontextualize themself within their Basque heritage. Utilizing voice and movement as mediums of resistance against hegemonic pressures.

Danica is receiving their BFA at Otis College of Art and Design with an emphasis in Sculpture and New Genres. They are from Burlingame, California and are currently based in Los Angeles, California.

{c.01/25/2025. Biographical text courtesy of the artist.}

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[A Note on Vestige (2024). Included in (paradise) .]

I feel like I have to move quickly or else something will continue to evaporate or fall through the floor: it’s hard to say where all the gravity is going. Or else I find myself looking up at the Madonna with my head between two waxed legs with the textural fluorescence of a formidable cheese left out in the sun. Like a shrunken little Oedipus I’m uncomfortable but comforted, even cheered-up, by this warped monumental posturing of (the absence of) motherly love. The oblong blues and greens of the high-up Virgin Mary point me toward the navel, the sky.

If I back-up I might bump-into or trample the pair of soles-up feet behind. At first I think they belong to the legs but then I realize that barring some sort of infradimensional contortion, they seem to belong to someone else—someone kneeling or prone in front of the sculpture. And then I start wondering why I feel a need to put the parts ‘back’ together—they very well may be whole as they are, in pieces. But the fact that my own body feels split between the parts makes me want to find connections….

One day: I overhear someone saying they are reminded of Robert Gober’s prosthetic leg sculptures, jutting out of the wall. And another day someone says they feel like it might suddenly scuttle over their head like a Louise Bourgeois.

A vestige is a trace of something that is disappearing or already gone. Or it’s the smallest amount of something that’s not nothing. Or it’s an organ or a part of a body that has lost the need to function (due to evolutionary adaptations). A tail, a spleen; a teensy-bit; a displaced residue or disembodied remainder. The original Latin that leaked into these was vestigium or ‘footprint.’ Something left behind that’s still there.

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Exhibitions with the Gallery: