Tag: Italy
I Throw the Stone
Box
Nello Spazio e Nel Tempo
“In Space and Time”
Fancy
Nature is far more fanciful than me.
L’Occhio
Num-Num
There is the inside, the outside and all around, there is life, there is death and other lives, there is oneself, none and all the others, there is light, dark and dusk, there is laughter, there is brightness, transparency and it can be opaque.
There is but, maybe and also, a little, nothing, and all the colors, all the fantasies, all the eyes, all the souls, all the sounds, all the noises…
…there is everything in and under every form.
The Ashes of the Occident
Al Cuore del Cuor
My connection and admiration for my fellow women grow ever stronger as I grow older. This was to have been the theme of my box.
My father died in my arms a short while ago, calling “Mama.” How varied, how interchangeable, how understanding of the incomprehensible we must be. How I strive to trust my instinct that taps deep, deep, deep into the strength, the capacity, the tenacity of a woman.
My box is for my father, whom I miss with all my hearts. He was a painter, he taught me to see.
Untitled
ITALY
Galleria Extra Moenia – Arte Moderna
Todi, Italy
May 4 – June 14, 1997
Giuliana Dorazio, Director
Ken Noland, Contact
OBJECTS OF MAGIC AND ENCHANTMENT
Women Beyond Borders narrates in a succession of expressions, the most interesting aspects of female art produced today in Europe and beyond.
– Martina Corgnati, Art historian
Gallery Extra Moenia – Arte Moderna, located in a 15th C villa overlooking the hills of Umbria, was the site of the WBB exhibition in Italy. The exhibition brought together WBB participants from Rome, Perugia, and Florence. Anthropologist Dr. Cecilia Gatto Trocchi spoke in the gallery on her impressions of the exhibition. In Dr. Trocchi’s words, “A simple and extraordinary point of departure, fascinating and complex: give a little box to an artist in order to free her fantasy, creativity, the impulse to meet and talk.”
“WBB is an initiative of planetary dimensions, involving many varied cultures, bringing forth discussions over a cube of unfinished wood of reduced dimensions. The creations are dressed in images, desires, expectations, dreams, and illusions. The omens and symbolic content of the creations are revealed by each artist in an unambiguous way. The boxes encompass conceptual concerns, crafted objects, nostalgic thoughts, including jewel cases or safety boxes containing treasures or secrets which every woman jealously keeps. These powerful objects represent the spectrum of human experience, love, birth, relationship, courage, violence, power, and death– objects of magic and enchantment.”
Martina Corgnati, art historian from Milan, explains, “WBB narrates, in a succession of expressions, the most interesting aspects of feminine art produced today in different countries, Europe and beyond. Perhaps, to this day, only Cesare Zavattini has conceived of building an exhaustive and exacting collection in “small format,” obliging all the artists, therein, to remain within the measurements of 10×10 cm.”
In reality the challenge of WBB is full of psychological and poetic interest, pertaining to women, such as refinement, intimacy, care for detail, sensibility. It is not surprising to notice these qualities in all the participants selected for this show. The fact that each succeeded in achieving a personal, unmistakable stylistic imprint, even though working within a limited format, is surely remarkable. For example, Carla Accardi, has created a tiny chamber symphony in blues and reds for the exterior and interior surfaces of the support including marks and traces over all that are typically, undeniably Accardian, filling the space that, although minute, seems to open up to an unexpected and unpredictable vastness.
In antithesis to this is the work of another Italian artist who, must be mentioned immediately because of historical precedence. For Dadamaino, actually, the box is not an indifferent support. It is not simply a way like any other to scrawl marks on a concave and a convex surface. On the contrary, it is literally a container in which to place, at least nominally as the title reveals, The Ashes of the Occident, reflecting a strong ideological tinge, yet one that is not without poetry. That there then should be an actual meaning is not so important; what counts is the naming and defining of meaning, and in this Dadamaino recalls the procedure conceived by her friend Piero Manzoni. The container, however, the symbolic urn, is closed. Is there really someone who would touch the ashes?
The Gossip Box by Claudine Lapique and Al Cuore del Cuor by Lise Apatoff are realistic miniaturizations of imaginable full-scale stages- A theater in the real sense of the word, which brings to mind the intimate and glittering choreography of Fausto Melotti. Rich with narrative values, magical boxes from which a story might issue, resulting from the meaningful contrast between internal and external: the sober decoration or almost subdued banality outside; and the extremely detached, colorful, even glittering descriptive treatment inside.
With playful curiosity, a taste for discovery, and the preciousness of fragments, Angela Dorazio (Num Num), Ilse Girona (Fancy), and Maril Eustachio (L’occhio) were chosen to represent our country on this long journey. An unbearable pleasure in painting appears, especially in the works by Dorazio and Girona. A sensitivity to images, overlapping and entwining in multicolored knots, transforms the container in to an unexpected visual carillon. In general, a certain discrete and intelligent concern for painting emerges in the work of the Italian artists. A brief and very general look at this exhibition, which is truly beyond borders, offers an overall view of the creativity of women artists, and of their expressions of imagination and freedom.
SEE BOXES FROM ITALY
Simulacra
Every little treasure has a message inside…..
SIMULACRA is the title I have chosen for my work in aluminum realized using the original box as a model for the casting. I engraved the cover of the box (previously covered with terra-cotta) with stylized signs, although the meaning of this work is not to be understood in these signs.
SIMULACRA (in the Latin larger sense means: copy, effigy, sculpture…) plays a role of criticism to the idea of original (represented by the original wooden box I received) and “copy” (in the way the original one is cast).
You may ask yourself which one has to be considered the original between the two: the two boxes having to be exhibited always together!
I play too with the idea of container and content implicit in the fact that the object is a box.
Finally the title SIMULACRA allows you to think about the platonic concept of mimesis (Art as imitation, in a larger sense), this is not to provide a solution but to push the viewer to think about these matters.
The Gossip Box
Arrivederci Roma
In a world of many and endless wars, this music box of memories represents moments of happiness from the past that offer us hope for a better future.
Invitation reverberates within the box’s walls. Notes hang from the ceiling, filling the shallow emptiness, filling us with the joy of a new moment, a new life, a sharing, a memory.