Mariana Pereira Vieira

(b. Brazil 1983) is a multi-media artist and arts educator based in Colorado, USA. She received a BFA in Photography from Georgia Southern University and an MFA in Interdisciplinary Media Arts Practices from the University of Colorado Boulder. Mariana’s artwork has been featured in exhibitions at the Museo de las Américas, Arvada Center for the Arts and Humanities, the Dairy Center for the Arts, Anderson Ranch Arts Center, the Center for Fine Art Photography, the Colorado Photographic Arts Center, Lenscratch, among others. In 2019, she was awarded the first Denis Roussel Fellowship from the Center for Fine Art Photography. In 2017, she curated the Colorado edition of The States Project for Lenscratch. Her latest project, Touching, received an Honorable Mention Award from the Center for the Humanities and the Arts from the University of Colorado Boulder and was displayed at the Colorado Photographic Arts Center. She is currently Interdisciplinary Media Arts Practices Coordinator at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Instagram @mariana.vieira.too

On A Loop

I grew up enchanted by fantastical stories found in books, folklore, movies, and playing games of make-belief. Growing up in Latin America during the ideological tensions and economic fallout of the Cold War led me to recognize how sociopolitical factors in a global scale affect individual outcome, and how structures of power can negate free will and individual choice.

Re-imagination and transformation are overarching themes in my work. In analog photography, light transforms ordinary matter into something new that represents the “real” world: this magical quality has fascinated me since my first roll of film. I use photography not to represent the “real” world, but to transform it, influenced by authors of magical-realism and artists of Surrealism. I contemplate popular culture, particularly how images in media are used as commodities to elicit desire, and to support structures of power based on the exclusion of individuals based on wealth, gender, race, sexual orientation, ethnicity, country of origin, and religious beliefs. 

In this body of work, I source Eadweard Muybridge’s iconic motion studies, started on commission for Governor Stanford of California to settle a bet about horses.  Muybridge’s plates posed male subjects in powerful, athletic action, while modestly covered the subjects’ genitals. The female models are posed walking, sitting, crawling, twirling, sweeping, mopping, taking care of children, and are exposed unclothed. 

Did these women have any agency in how they would be documented and researched for posterity? The series of original plates, when animated, play in an infinite loop. In the early days of photography, did they know or understand that they would be captured on an infinite loop to be displayed forever? 

On A Loop re-imagines the women from the 19th century motion studies. It stops the loop, and gives one subject a chance to pause and to pursue a different destiny.