DANIELA EDBURG
Juxtaposing elements from the Gothic imagination, Romantic ambivalences, and the contradictions of human nature, Daniela Edburg weaves narratives in photography and felted wool within the interstices of the real and the fantastic. Her most recent series Autoimmune and Malaise (both 2018-2021) bring human and glacial bodies into dialogue with each other, with the symbol of disease and deformity becoming a herald of the perils of climate change. Reflecting on what Edburg calls the “Frankenstein effect,” when “what we create turns around to destroy us,” her work delves into destruction as a characteristic of human nature. Approaching the body as an otherness through the distorted perspective of disease—one incomprehensible from the vantage of health—she draws out the delicate symbiosis between humanity and the natural world.
Fabricating enigmatic scenes that approach absurdity, Edburg confronts the viewer with the human morass of indulgence, desire, and erratic impulses that intertwine pleasure and destruction. Her series Drop Dead Gorgeous (2001-2006) muses on the extreme seduction of objects of desire that culminates in death, in scenes that overlap the everyday and the dreamlike. Those stark contrasts, imbuing all of Edburg’s work, underscore the intricate web of environmental, psychological, social, and physical dynamics. At question is the tender relationship between our own bodies and the world around us. Through portraiture, landscape, and still life, Edburg approaches the monstrous as a repository of fears, anxieties, and threats, both natural and supernatural.
Daniela Edburg attended the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) where she earned her Bachelor’s degree from the School of Visual Arts. Edburg was born in 1975 in Houston, Texas and currently lives and works in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. Solo and group exhibitions include Musée du Quai Branly, Paris, France, Photographic Centre Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Oaxaca City, Mexcio, San Diego Museum of Photographic Arts, CA, Contemporary Musuem of Art, Ivanova, Russia and The Denver Art Museum, CO. Her work can be found in the collections of the Museet Astrup Fearnley, Oslo, Norway, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA, Art Museum of the Americas, Washington DC, Museo Universitario del Chopo, México DF, Mexico, and the Museum of Latin American Art, Long Beach, CA. A 2018-2020 Fellowship recipient in the National System of Creators, FONCA, National Fund for the Arts and Culture of Mexico, Daniela was also a 2016 Hamilton Artist at the Denver Art Museum and the University of Denver, a 2013 Laureate of the Photoquai Residencies by the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris, France, was a 2012 resident artist with FONCA CONACULTA in collaboration with the Banff Centre, Alberta, Canada, named Best Foreign Artist in the Photography category by Premio Arte Laguna, Venezia, Italia in 2010 and received a 2004 Creation Stimuli Grant from Guanajuato State Institute of Culture, Mexico.