ARTIST BIOGRAPHY: 

Fredy Rivas is a multidisciplinary artist, native to Colombia based in Calgary Canada since 2016, migrated to Montreal Canada in 2011.

He obtained an undergraduate degree in Arts and Education from the Francisco José de Caldas District University (Bogotá) and, onwards, established an artistic dialogue between this field and Architectural Design, for he later studied Architectural Drawing and Theory of Architectonical Space, complementing studies on community-based art and public art.

As an artist residing in Canada, the Quebec Government Program Integration of Art (2013) awarded him with a permanent public piece entitled Étendue de rêves, a Corten steel and programmed LED lighting that, to this day, propose a dialogue between sculpture/Light and the public architectonical space in the City of Granby, Quebec.

As a result of his life experience as an expatriated artist in Canada, and as a foreign citizen trying to discover and understand the everyday life and identities of his host country and towns, from 2013 onwards he developed a deep interest in the diverse dynamics deployed by Canadian peoples to weave communal bounds through material culture, particularly on the singular scenario offered by the Highway towns. As a way to meditate on these bounds, he found on travelling and recollection of local material/documents on everyday life (artifacts, photography, cartographies, video footage and sound archives recording the auditive landscape of small and big cities) a powerful and poietic tool, the milestone grounding the auto representation of local people and, at the same time, summons the individual experiences of an individual through its materiality.

In 2019 and 2020 Fredy Rivas got a grant from Calgary Arts Development to develop his project called Highway II on going.

fredyrivas.ca
Instagram: @jofybass