Lua Barbosa
College of Fine Arts Studio Art (MFA)

Maculate X

I’m a Brazilian visual artist with a medium-fluid practice, currently focusing on ceramics, digital art, photography, fibers, performance, painting, and printmaking. In 2017, I received my bachelor’s degree in Painting at the Fine Arts School of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. Since then, my work has been part of one solo show and more than ten group shows in Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and Florida. My current research interests are the Anthropocene, our relationship with animals, domesticated and wild birds, otherness, whiteness x racialized bodies, and migration. Why birds? There is something to be said about the human aspiration to fly, maybe inspired by how this warm-blooded class is free and has sovereignty over their movement. It can be said that we restricted our movement as much as we could while we searched for our ambition to touch the sky. In this body of work, I explore our cultural responses to beings with wings. How do our aesthetic values and social contexts directly affect our relationship with birds and their way of living? Hacking the narrative and symbolism used to justify the poetical nature of beings who are aesthetically pleasing and rare enough to be preserved, and instead inserting those who are considered banal, not that valuable.

Artwork Description:

This artwork delves into the impact of whiteness on our perception of the Columbia Livia species, representing spirituality when white but seen as a plague in other hues, or as flesh rather than an icon. Whiteness, a social construct, marginalizes diverse experiences and shapes our Anthropocene-era environmental interactions, rooted in colonial heritage. I disrupt the Holy Spirit symbol through appropriation, employing traditional materials like wood and clay. The cyborg concept is implied via domesticated pigeons, blending natural and cultural elements, as well as by my process merging analog and digital techniques.