Frescos by
N. Sean Glover and Daniela River
September 23 – November 11, 2023
opening reception: Saturday, September 23 • 3-5pm
gallery hours: Thursdays 12-4pm and by appointment
email or call 617.835.8255
Drive-by Projects is pleased to present Deep Time: Frescos by N. Sean Glover and Daniela Rivera. When hearing the term fresco we tend to think of Pompeii, the Sistine Chapel or the Mexican Muralism movement. Though it flies a bit under the radar, the use of fresco continues today, and the art of making fresco is still taught in places like Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and the Oaxaca Mural School, Oaxaca, Mexico. Sean Glover and Daniela Rivera have worked in both locations and bring their contemporary interpretations of fresco to Deep Time at Drive-by Projects.
“In my work, I fuse together disparate materials and processes to destabilize what is considered “precious” and to question all imposed hierarchies that are traditional, political, and cultural.”
Sean Glover has taught fresco painting at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and has been working in this medium for over twenty years. As a sculptor and painter, he is committed to the labor and craft of making fresco, though he likes to employ non-traditional materials and processes in his work. Drawn by the tension of combining a synthetic surface with the natural cycle of fresco, Glover makes his frescos on insulation foam, often exposing the edges of his work to reveal the underlying strata.
Deep Time includes pieces from both Glover’s moon fresco paintings (titled the moon used to be a part of us) and his Regolith series. The moon frescos are sgraffito frescos where scratching through a light surface reveals the dark layer below to create a glowing lunar orb. The geologic term regolith refers to the loose layer of broken rock and dust that sits atop bedrock. Most of the moon’s visible surface is composed of regolith. Glover recreates the pock-marked, asteroid beaten moon surface by allowing rain to fall on the wet surface of wet frescoes on chunky Styrofoam scraps. By intertwining the many years that it takes for his foam supports to wear away and the similarly imperceivably amount of time required for a fresco to fully calcify, Glover creates a paradoxical relationship that defines his work.
“I work ideas through materials and processes in an attempt to bring together disparate times and traditions in one place.”
Daniela Rivera has been traveling through Latin America learning to work with adobe and lime, and making frescos. She refers to herself as a cultural producer working as a visual artist who considers it her responsibility to always challenge “the construction of stereotypes or categories that discriminate, isolate, and violently define other’s identities “. Back in Boston after returning from a residency at Headlands Center for the Arts and a commissioned installation in Chile, she will be including some of the residues of her journey in Deep Time.
Like Sean Glover, Rivera explores the potential of fresco as a material, often repurposing found objects to create hybrids or “urban fossils.” While in residence at The Headlands, she roamed the local landscape in search of urban detritus on which to create frescos. Buckets are among the objects Rivera chooses. Not only are they functional in her fresco-making process, they also represent the circular process of recycling and reuse. Addressing episodes in political history, the history of art, and personal history, Daniela Rivera seeks to generate open-ended conversations between viewer, artist, and subject.
