“A Redefined Existence” Exhibition
J. Cacciola Gallery
This event has ended.
Sometimes the best way to make sense of our chaotic, often incomprehensible world is to create another one, create a world that edits our own, shuffles the context , and realigns it in the cosmos.
J. Cacciola Gallery’ s exhibition presents the work of three artists — China Marks, Rick Newton and Sally Curcio — who create such worlds, taking elements of the familiar and reinventing them as comp onents of A Redefined Exist ence.
Though the voice and vision of each artist is distinctive, their fantastic worlds express the very real, universally shared issues of what it means to be human, to live on this earth; how we thrive utilizing the creative means we can control or surv ive those circumstances we can’t.
China Marks investigates these questions through two of humanity’s oldest methods: storytelling and sewing. Marks’ colorful imagery, created from disparate fabrics sewn onto cloth panels, depicts beings at once phantasmago rical and familiar, human and not, male and female or both or neither, all bound together in a narrative which reconfigures the idea of storytelling. Marks removes storytelling from the conventional linear form, taking apart its essentials, and like a chil d tossing candy in the air, letting those essentials fall in a new pattern.
Treating each work as a drawing, using thread as her drawing tool, Marks’ sewn panels thus evoke equally our childhood dreams and our adult fantasies and fears; in other words, th e full spectrum of our — and Marks’ — interior life. A recent work, “A Foreign Affair,” typifies Marks’ narrative and visual imagination. Though the narrative of the sewn text at first appears to be a traditional “eternal triangle” story of a sailor who cheats on his wife with another woman, the imagery, assembled — or “appropriated” as Marks calls it — from fabrics containing faces, flora, fauna, human and inanimate forms, etc., combines into a wilder and deeper experience than a mere tale of a cheating husband. W e are now in the realm of irrationality as truth, a direct challenge to the modern world’s commitment to rational thought and its restrictive definitions of a story well told or a life well lived. Instead, Marks explodes our conventional reliance on an ord erly narrative of “Once upon a time” and reconfigures it as “Anything and always upon everything and all time.”
Rick Newton’s paintings, on the other hand, deal very much with the generally recognizably real: realistic renderings of birds, sea creatures, t rains, planes, space vehicles, buildings and so on. But he assembles them in a nearly empty, surreal world that re - orients our sense of place and balance, our cognition of what’s believable. Newton’s narratives, influenced by once ominous Cold War imagery and the precise illustrations in science textbooks, presents our organic reality as a re - ordered future where the function of everything, living creatures or constructed technology, is upended, creating an entirely new hierarchy. The power of a rocket ship or a submarine is now inert and at the mercy of a giant, airborne crab claw. The claw, the dominant character in all of the paintings, is sometimes an element of a larger organism composed of human internal organs; sometimes an appendage to a space vehicl e; and sometimes in the company of birds or cuttlefish. This claw is now the arbiter of power in this re - ordered world.
Though a sense of uneasiness pervades Newton’s imagery, his paintings also convey great beauty. His draftsmanship, his confident handli ng of paint, are in art’s traditions of acute observation of nature and mastery of form, practices that date back to the Renaissance. And by painting onto plaster panels, Newton’s colors carry an elegant clarity which then harmonize with touches of graphit e that give drama and contrast to the white plaster ground. Newton’s created worlds then, though initially unsettling, do indeed embody their own internal order, both aesthetic and psychological. They are worlds recognizable and alien at the same time.
Sally Curcio’s “Bubbles” series is the antithesis of unease. Instead, Curcio’s worlds invite us to come romp inside our most delightful fantasies of time, place, memory and imagination. Using a wide variety of materials including beads, pins, bathmats, eyelas hes, flocking, wire and other textures, Curcio creates contained environments, usually in a 12 inch by 12 inch wooden frame domed by an acrylic bubble, or encased in a glass sphere in the manner of a snow globe. They are, in effect, three - dimensional world s evoking cities, the countryside, shorelines; some of them referencing real places, such as “Miami,” some referencing mythological places, such as “Sherwood Forest,” and some referencing the playfulness of fairytales, such as the snow globe containing the “White Queen’s Castle.”
They are shimmering worlds of color, shape and texture. Thousands of colorful glass beads of various shapes and sizes create a shining architecture; pieces of textured mats, flocking and other materials create fantastic landscapes . Contained within their acrylic bubble or in their glass sphere, Curcio has created protected environments, the kinds of safe worlds we inhabited in the imaginings of our childhood. And yet, they are fragile, too, worlds made of fragile materials and frag ile thoughts, delicate as a half - remembered dream. This duality of the safe and the fragile is part of the atmosphere that circulates like air through each of Curcio’s worlds, providing them with energy.
J. Cacciola Gallery’s presentation of the work of Ch ina Marks, Rick Newton and Sally Curcio in A Redefined Existence invites visitors to leave our commonplace, everyday experience and spend some time in the realm of the fantastic. Leave your ordinary day at the door.
Media
Schedule
from June 19, 2014 to July 26, 2014
Opening Reception on 2014-06-19 from 18:00 to 20:00