Ricas y famosas
Last week in Houston I managed to see Daniela Rossell's "Ricas y Famosas" show at UH's Blaffer Gallery. It is made up of large-scale, elaborately posed and luridly colorful photos of (mostly) young women from Mexico City's super-rich.
It's hard to get much sense of it from the pallid versions of the photos available online, but it seems to me that the work is less about social documentary than about irony at war with itself. One suspects that the kitsch palaces in which many of the photos are shot belong to the parents and grandparents of the subjects, against which they are making an ironic stand (the woman in the dollar-bill-print kimono watching two dachsunds mate in front of the altar in the family chapel, or the ride-'em-cowgirl shot in a luxurious office decorated with icons of Emiliano Zapata and the corrupt PRI). But other women seem to be in their own environment (the sex-bomb rooftop shots, debutantes at a ball, or young women posed with the stuffed animal collections of their teenage rooms). Then again, maybe a measure of irony is one more trapping of wealth, alongside the designer clothes and the pet lion in the living room. The artist's bio says that the subjects are drawn from Rossell's friends and family, so the ambiguous distance from her material would seem natural.
The show will be at the Blaffer through June 13. A similar show seems to happen from time to time elsewhere, and Rossell appears in many other shows. There's also a Ricas y Famosas book available from Amazon.