HOUSTON, TEXAS.- The Blaffer Gallery at the University of Houston presents “Daniela Rossell: Ricas y famosas,” on view through June 13, 2004. Daniela Rossell’s large, luscious and acutely observed photographs from her notorious series Ricas y famosas (Rich and Famous) , created between 1998 and 2002 and published in a book by the same title, afford a rare insider’s glimpse into the world of the Mexico’s upper class whose ostentatious lifestyles stand in stark contrast to the extreme poverty that characterizes life in Mexico outside their gated mansions.

Rossell’s subjects are mostly women, often the artist’s personal friends or members of her affluent and powerful family, who posed for her in the extravagant surroundings of their own homes. Rossell stages her photographs with an ethnographer’s precision and a cinematographer’s aplomb to create powerful images. Her careful compositions are replete with extreme angles and mirrored reflections and establish telling relationships between her characters and their environment. Every decorative detail - from the seemingly omnipresent gilded mirrors and chandeliers and the eclectic mix of architectural citations and faux period furniture, to the idealizing family portraits, the colonies of taxidermist animals and stuffed toy-pets populating every room - speaks of the vulgar excesses, indulgence and self-celebration of extreme but newly gained wealth.

Lacking any historical lineage, Rossell’s nouveau-riche subjects claim legitimacy through a compulsory demonstration of buying power and the sheer will to showcase idiosyncrasy through the exoticism of their fairy-tale lifestyles culled from a random set of cultural references indicative of wealth and power. The women portrayed by Rossell seem to live in a world ruled by the adage ’he who dies with the most toys wins,’ and as Barry Schwabsky writes in his introduction to Ricas y Famosas, "Just as their wealth allows them to spoil themselves physically, to indulge in a life of conspicuous consumption but also of conspicuous sexuality, it defends them against having to face any antagonistic worldview."

Sex is a clear subtext in these photographs, with the women striking seductive, often provocative, poses and modeling scant or revealing clothing. Rossell describes the images as the result of a close collaboration between photographer and model; the women were free to choose how they wished to be represented. However, if they welcomed photography as a means to reveal their true selves, they quickly limited their self-expression to clichéd poses reinterpreted a million times by film and media. Hollywood and consumerism emerge as the only points of reference for these women caught in the trappings of their own wealth and narcissism. Their self-image and representation is squarely aligned with the likes of movie stars and models. "I like to play with people’s conceptions of what a photograph should be," comments Rossell. "The women figure out from magazines and television what they think a photographer should snap, and they start performing."

With the setting of the photographs ultimately more expressive than the characters inhabiting them, Rossell’s images also offer a powerful statement about these women’s status as dependants, as wives and daughters, and their sense of purpose or lack thereof. As Rossell points out, "wealthy women in Mexico are prisoners of their houses, style and excess. Most of them live in the salon. They really want to look American, like what you see on TV, and they go to a lot of work to accomplish that. It’s a kind of hell. There’s so much unhappiness among the people who supposedly have everything."

Against the backdrop of Mexican poverty Rossell’s images become not only a charged, if ambivalent study of affluence, taste and consumption but also of political corruption and misdemeanor. Although not identified as such by Rossell, who prefers for her subjects to remain anonymous, many of the portrayed are somehow related to members of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, which ruled and exploited Mexico from 1929 to 2000, while claiming to represent the impoverished populace. They include the son of Carlos Salinas, now living in exile in Ireland for plundering the country’s assets for personal gain, and a granddaughter of a former president, Gustavo Días Ordaz, and stepdaughter of Raúl Salinas, brother of Carlos. Her grandfather was the president during the worst civilian massacre in modern Mexico’s history (1968) and her stepfather is now in prison accused of murder, money laundering and several other crimes committed during his brother’s administration.

The moralizing and political subtext of abiding class disparities is obvious and inescapable. If the allusion to corrupt political governance and the possibly questionable sources of the wealth on display is oblique, the fleet of servant and maids operating in the background serves as a clear reminder of the manpower needed to spin the wheels of the lives of the rich. Yet the pictures are far from being judgmental, rather they reveal the photographer’s sympathy with her models. She is, after all, by birth one of them, having grown up on a very ornamented estate with fiberglass replicas of Olmec heads in the garden. But unlike them, Rossell is conscious of the artificially constructed existences of these appointed or self-proclaimed princesses and harem ladies and their complete remove from the everyday reality of life in a Mexico.

Daniela Rossell was born in 1973 in Mexico City. In 1989 she enrolled in acting classes at the Nueclo de Estudes Teatrales, while attending the American School Foundation. In 1993 she took up undergraduate studies of painting at the National School of Visual Arts in Mexico City, but soon dropped out to pursue photography. Since 1996 she has had solo exhibitions in galleries and museums in Mexico City, New York, Miami, Salamanca Munich and San Antonio and numerous group exhibitions all over the world. She lives and works in Mexico City.