Antonio Petracca "Overlay"
Kim Foster Gallery
This event has ended.
Antonio Petracca’s new exhibition ‘Overlay’ is a series of paintings and prints developed from his previous work that explored the effect that stereotyping has in forming or distorting perceptions of identity. His specific focus was Italian Americans. By superimposing ethnic jokes and graffiti over ancient murals of Pompeii, Petracca drew attention to the insidiousness of stereotyping.
His new series of work mines similar territory, but his focus is broader. He uses the theatrical to investigate how the use of color, identification with cultural and architectural landmarks, could help or hinder the process of formulating one’s identity.
In ‘Overlay’, classical, modern, and contemporary visual languages are intertwined. In most of the work, historical monuments, e.g. the Pantheon, the Capitoline Museums in Rome, and other places of significance in Italy, are overlaid with graphic, hard-edged bands of red, green and sometimes white. These bands of color lay on the surface, acting as a painterly device or a kind of graffiti, to disrupt the viewer’s ability to specifically relate to and identify the information underneath. For instance, in the painting titled ‘Pantheon’, he has disrupted the classical symmetry of the dome shaped building, arguably one of the most significant architectural wonders of the world, with crisscrossed red and green lines. Since red, green and the Pantheon are part of Italian and to some extent Italian American identity, is Petracca hindering or adding something to the process? Some of the paintings and prints in ‘Overlay’ rely on other methods, such as extreme contrast of light and shadow, but the resulting message is entirely consistent.
Media
Schedule
from May 16, 2009 to June 20, 2009
Opening Reception on 2009-05-16 from 18:00 to 20:00