Valletta is married to Olympic volleyball player Chip McCaw. She appeared on the cover of magazines and in advertisements for Louis Vuitton, Calvin Klein and Versace and hosted MTV's House of Style with fellow model Shalom Harlow. She got her start in the fashion industry when her mother enrolled her in modeling school at the age of fifteen at the Linda Layman Agency. Valletta was born in Phoenix, Arizona and raised in Tulsa, Oklahoma. She has since appeared in films such as Man About Town (2006), Dead Silence (2007), Gamer (2009), and The Spy Next Door (2010). She then starred in the hit film Hitch (2005). She made her film debut in Drop Back Ten (2000). She began her career as a model for fashion agencies, and appeared on cover pages of internationally recognized magazines.
Text: Maren Richter.Amber Evangeline Valletta (born February 9, 1974) is an American actress and model. Press release courtesy Valletta Contemporary, Malta. Raphael Vella opens up a complex debate on representation to indicate a different plot of how we could imagine forms of curing in cultural, institutional and discursive spaces that are disruptive, unruly, intense, incompatible, contradictory or transforming. Crumbling architecture and cartographies or populist slogans meet collective amnesia and other social illnesses, and suggest That Other Place should be recognised as a diverse and dynamic entity-an object of political love and social desire, a model for emulation and identification, an object of care and hospitality. The drawings, mixed media works and stop motion animations, presented in the exhibition at Valletta Contemporary, juxtapose political, architectural and medical narratives, challenging the idea that institutionalised political systems provide healing to people across a wide spectrum of identities.
His artworks contrast illustrations lifted from historical medical, surgical and other books with imagery or texts related to political ideals and parliamentary models. Over the years, artist, educator and researcher Vella has developed a unique and profound artistic language for voices and choices of resistance and a sense of agency and advocacy for 'the Other' by making reference to institutions and systems that have become dysfunctional in a dystopian world-in a context in which illness itself no longer holds a form of truth with respect to the subject, as we all experienced it in recent times on a planetary scale. The other place refers to the kingdom of the ill, which she opposes to the kingdom of the well by exploring dehumanising myths and metaphors associated with the most infamous illnesses of modernity.
Raphael Vella's exhibition title That Other Place draws inspiration from Susan Sontag's 'citizens of that other place' in her book, Illness as Metaphor. Psychoanalyst and Dadaists' friend Jacques Lacan, for example, defines 'the Other' as the conventions of social life organised under the category of the law. The concept of 'The other'-the ones outside – has been widely reflected upon in Western philosophy, political theories and systems. The ancient Greeks used the word barbarians to categorise 'the others', the non-citizens.
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