Javiera Estrada
- Michael Hanna
- 1 day ago
- 3 min read
Javiera Estrada is a performance art filmmaker and photographer who has exhibited and participated in galleries and art fairs all around the world. Most of Javiera’s exhibitions have occurred in Los Angeles but she has also displayed in San Francisco, Las Vegas, Aspen, Santa Monica, Malibu, Palm Springs, London, Hamburg, Basel, Hong Kong, and Singapore. Her most recent solo exhibitions include galleries such as Jonathan Carver Moore Gallery in San Francisco, Skye Gallery in Aspen, and Show Gallery in Los Angeles. Recent collective shows include Gallery 33 in Santa Monica, Leica Gallery in Hollywood and Fathom Gallery in Los Angeles.
Most of Javiera’s works are figurative performance art but she also captures landscapes and still lifes with hallucinogenic colors. The performative pieces reflect Javiera’s reaction to the age of digitization, as her figures seem to harken back to simpler times, such as technicolor or primal dance. She seeks to capture the dichotomy between the conscious and unconscious self, which often results in dream-like productions such as a woman swimming inside a bedroom in her films or nude females painted with polka dots and shaved heads within an open field in her photography.
The films of Javiera Estrada tend to be her most poignant works in which she serves as a director amongst a well-staffed cast and crew, revealing a well-produced film production with high production values. Films like The Dream (pictured above) reveal a brilliant composition of combining the art of dance with metaphorical performance art. The film starts with a woman in a field of flowers, followed by visions of swimming in darkness and laying in a smoke-filled bedroom. The actual dream starts following these events revealing a primal dance between a man and woman in tattered clothing and powdered bodies. With a conclusion of red dust being poured onto them, they become splashed with water and the dreamer awakes from her bedroom swimming in an ocean-filled interior and then back to a field of exotic flowers. These gestural connotations suggest the dance remains an integral part of connecting the chain of events between consciousness and reality. Javiera tries to communicate to the audience the notion of objectivity lies within motion, stillness, and nature. The piece can be described as a direct reaction to digitization, seeking to escape the confines of the technological world through a series of events which conceptualize isolation and contemplation.
Back to the Future: Life in Technicolor (pictured above) delves on similar themes. Brightly-colored, head-shaved women stand idly by in front of a contemporary interior. Their private parts covered with nothing more than paint, they stand totally nude against orangy-tinted foliage and a cyan-color sky. Their contrapasto stance suggests confidence and comfort as if how they are presented would be their natural state. A fascinating study into the realm of psychological impulses surrounding photography and performance.
Javiera Estrada is a risk-taker and provocateur who creates experimentations in expressing the figure with both dream-like and interchangeable settings. Her performative works investigate the purpose of both the conscious and unconscious interpretations of reality through imaginative settings and dynamic interactions of actors through embracing each other or through primal dance. The haunting audio in her films, the stunning darkness of her open compositions, and the absurdity of ‘techni-colored’ women interacting with each other, reveals an artist willing to guide performance towards interpretations of contemporary placement and identity.
