Cecilia Bonilla

With a multidisciplinary practice, Cecilia Bonilla’s work spans across collage, photography, video, and sculpture, through to larger installations and site-specific interventions.

In her compositions, Cecilia often appropriates mass-produced imagery from sources such as discarded books, fashion magazines, and catalogues. Taking this existing imagery, she subverts its original meaning through subtle alterations or amendments which reconfigure, pervert, and dismantle the original image source. Throughout her work, themes of domesticity, the ideals of beauty, “lifestyle”, and other social constructs are questioned, corrupted, and undermined through minimal, yet skilful, assemblage and modification.

Between Animals and Trees

Her sculptures and installations follow the same subtle approach, often combining discarded domestic materials with “randomly” selected objects. Playfully, yet seriously, she combines material to create ephemeral assemblages and installations, usually precarious in nature. Her works often provoke a pull-push gravitation between attraction and repulsion.

Between Animals and Trees 9

In her collection titled Between Animals and Trees, images of females performing classic yoga poses are juxtaposed with images appropriated from a vintage insect encyclopaedia and positioned in such a way that they obscure and replace the subject’s physiognomy.

Cecilia says, “Following a long term interest in Freudian association of animality and sexual desire and “Animal horror B-Cinema”, this series evokes feelings of threat, infestation, and fear, in relation to the current crisis.”