Joseph Grazi "The Fountain of Youth"
(Art) Amalgamated
This event has ended.
(Art) Amalgamated presents The Fountain of Youth, an exhibition of installation, works on paper, and photographs by Joseph Grazi. In Joseph’s first solo show at (Art) Amalgamated, he’s created a utopian environment of unrestrained joy and play, filling the gallery with thousands of red, yellow, green and purple plastic balls that viewers must wade through in order to navigate the space. Grazi’s works on paper extend the ball motif with silhouetted ciphers and ink renderings of toys, religious symbolism and parental figures, which the artist closely associates with his youthful experiences. His photographs show his friends: nude and covered with colored dot stickers, in richly theatrical and staged compositions.
Grazi’s intention is to activate the viewers inner child, creating what he refers to as an “adult playground”, where preconceived notions of a traditional exhibit are subverted. Indeed, he motivates viewers into a deeply interactive public setting full of chance experiences with both the works and the other viewers. The exhibition draws extensively on the artist’s admiration of 1960’s pop and conceptual art. In works like Cash, Cat, Father and Mudflap Girl, the influence of seminal artists like Warhol and Ruscha is evident through the depiction of instantly recognizable imagery culled from advertising and mass media, serialized and simplified to their pictorial essence. With Grazi’s installation, Grazi aligns himself to past movements and happenings like The Exploding Plastic Inevitable and Fluxus.
The overall effect of the exhibition is to create an environment that the viewing public recognizes as both a nostalgic journey through the transitional period of childhood innocence to the realities of adulthood. By combining both themes of juvenile and adult forms of “play”, the artist makes a pointed criticism at the ever decreasing time of irresponsibility and worldly naivete that our global mass-media culture allows us to exist in.
Grazi was born in 1983 and graduated the School of Visual Arts in 2006. He has exhibited widely throughout New York art galleries including Melody Weir Gallery, Dash Gallery and Volume Black, as well as museums such as the Chelsea Art Museum and The Metropolitan Museum of Art. He last showed with Lambert Fine Arts at Fountain Art Fair during Art Basel, Miami Beach. Grazi currently lives and works in Brooklyn.
Media
Schedule
from February 29, 2012 to March 17, 2012
Opening Reception on 2012-02-29 from 18:00 to 21:00