Melissa Bonilla Vaiven.
Swing – To the sea the question
CURATORIAL TEXT SHORT DESCRIPTION
The work Vaivén (2022) of the A-mar la pregunta Series by Melissa Bonilla, is a work that materializes doubt, wandering as a bet from which to make the world. Wandering as an act of thinking about the path we take while we reflect, discarding straight paths and believing in curved ones. A two-channel animation with fragments of text appearing asynchronously incite to experience and visualize certain sensations from the context of the ocean and the waves to stimulate transformation processes that are at times confusing and at other times more evident.
DETAILS
MEDIUM: Video
DURATION: 3:15
Melissa Bonilla (Melissa Llamo) is a multidisciplinary artist who graduated in social communication and specializes in audiovisual production from the Pontificia Universidad Católica Madre y Maestra. In 2021 she was selected to participate in the 28th Eduardo León Jimenes Art Contest and in the same year she participated in the XXIX National Biennial of Visual Arts of the Dominican Republic. In 2022 she was part of the group exhibition “Materia Palpitante” of the Artist Training Program of the Eduardo León Jimenes Cultural Center. She has been selected for the CATAPULT 2022 Art program: a collaboration between Kingston Creative and the American Friends of Jamaica. Through her work she analyzes her surroundings from the perspective of emotions and feelings, understanding these as creators of an individual reality that manifests itself as bodily sensations and poetic metaphors of everyday experiences in the Caribbean territory/space where she lives.
She uses language that could be considered minimalist and creates from the information obtained when analyzing what she perceives, digital illustrations that reflect the bodily and sensory perspective on her approaches to people, the experience of walking through the city and her encounters with the sea / water spaces. In addition to digital illustrations, she experiments with animations and, more recently, with installations in which she seeks to recreate, through organic movements, the sensorially of the experience of feeling. She is undertaking an investigation to understand the Caribbean by means of the existentialist philosophy that surrounds her constructions of identity. By this she means navigating from an emotional point of view, between the poetics and narratives of what it means to exist in that region of the planet. At the same time, she intends to continue experimenting with physical and digital objects to create organic animations produced by light, shadow, water and colors, understanding these as primitive forms that contain the possibility of the pure language of feeling.
Melissa lives and works in the Dominican Republic.
