Joseph Grazi “Happy Place”
Joseph Gross Gallery
This event has ended.
Art Now NY presents Happy Place, a solo exhibition of new work by New York based artist Joseph Grazi. This is the first exhibition of Grazi’s work at Art Now NY.
Anxiety about death comes from its conceptual impracticality, as the state is simultaneously final and infinite. This subconscious irreconcilability manifests as a revulsion of physical decay. Grazi manifests those fears in his mediums: bones and bat wings. Contrasted with perfect red marbles and living roses held in vitrines, the organic material is magnificent, and undeniably communal. Happy Place is a celebration of death’s certainty and native beauty.
When confronted with death, the mental path most often taken is a slip into a dissociative Happy Place. Grazi’s sculptures and altars prosthelytize an alternative; bat’s stacked wings, and cat’s skeletons are arranged in the familiar shapes of a heart symbol and Sphinxpose. Fanged monkey skulls are raised over live roses. Inside slick Plexiglass vessels, the organic sculptures have a soft warmth, and, despite that they are dying or dead, their materials activate feelings of love and lightness. These positive associations contest the primal fear of death, and the unnatural fight against it. Grazi shows the particular irregularity of natural lines and decay represent an aesthetic worthy of reverence.
The themes of Happy Place are an elaboration on Joseph Grazi’s previous works, including 2012’s ‘Fountain of Youth,’ made of colored marbles and plastic toy balls, and 2011’s ‘Legends,’ sculpted with bat wings. The elements of his compositions vacillate between sarcastic estrangement from the world’s endlessly repeating component parts, to holismand are always antithetical to the seemingly literal message of the artwork’s sum. Everything is true in this interwork inconsistency, as it is in the viewer’s existence: on a micro and celestial level, all biologic and manmade things are essentially the same; the middle is a grey area of vast individuation. The shock of Grazi’s work gives way to winged optimism in an uncomfortable mental space.
Joseph Grazi, born in 1983, lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. He received a BFA in Film and Animation from the School of Visual Arts in 2006. His work has been shown in solo exhibitions at New York City’s Melody Weir Gallery, The Proposition Gallery, and (Art) Amalgamated.
[Image: Joseph Grazi “Love” 122 taxidermied bats on wood panel, 48” x 48”, 2013]
Media
Schedule
from November 07, 2013 to November 30, 2013
Opening Reception on 2013-11-07 from 18:00 to 21:00