NYAB Event - Beatrice Scaccia “Little Gloating Eve”

Beatrice Scaccia “Little Gloating Eve”

Cuchifritos

This event has ended.

This is the second of three Workspace 2014 exhibitions, featuring the work of LES Studio Program artists-in-residence.

Cuchifritos Gallery + Project Space presents Little Gloating Eve, a solo exhibition of recent work by Beatrice Scaccia. The evolution of an ongoing body of work, this installation acts as an immersion into the human condition, inviting us into the life of Scaccia’s central character, Eve. Rendering movements ranging from banal to absurd (cooking, dancing, listening to music, eating flowers), Scaccia uses the faceless Eve concealed in layers of grey clothing and padding, to construct a narrative of fragments and repetition in dilated time. A close emulation of dozens of simple, borrowed actions, Scaccia deconstructs these familiar gestures to build her own fiction — fixed in the pattern of a wallpaper, the loop of an animated gif, or the edges of a panel — revealing both the foolishness and wonder of our routines.

First appearing in 2010, Eve’s world has evolved from two-dimensional planes into an immersive installation of wallpaper, drawings, works on panel, animations, a garden of ceramic flowers created by Japanese artist Toshiaki Noda, as well as a soundtrack made by the French musician Lionel Laquerriere. Once trapped in a cell-like room with only a single small window to reflect the world beyond her rigid confines, Little Gloating Eve offers us the first opportunity to enter Eve’s universe. As a protagonist, Eve is both sinister and playful, suspended between being a child and a play toy; an attempt to return to the lightness and magic of childhood that has since been lost to time. With a story told through syncopated moments, Scaccia creates a sense of freedom, one that is relieved of both reason and judgement.

For this incarnation of the project, Scaccia invited dozens of Italian elementary school students to draw Eve doing one thing, based on a written description of the character. This resulted in a remarkable collection of drawings, which will be on view in the gallery, that have in turn influenced many of Scaccia’s own representations of Eve. As Scaccia explains, “Isolation is the worst risk an artist can experience. My very first idea was completely different. Throughout dialogues and discussions, I understood that my needs were elsewhere. I became too attached to some executive manners, losing the urgencies.”