Gabriella D'Italia



September 28-October 24, 2010
Opening Reception Friday October 1, 5-8pm


Material Index: In Consideration of Counting, In Memory of Necessary Omissions
88” x 86”, 20 yards cotton sateen including all trimmed ends and cut remains, cotton batting, thread

"Material Index, diptych"
commercial cotton, cotton batting, embroidery floss, beads, thread, paper, foil, hardware 36" x 55" x 1"

"Material Index, diptych" (detail)
commercial cotton, cotton batting, embroidery floss, beads, thread, paper, foil, hardware 36" x 55" x 1"

Gabriella D’Italia grew up in Morristown, NJ. After receiving her BA in Philosophy and the History of Science and Mathematics through the great books program at St. John’s College, and living several years in Boston, she moved to Newburgh, Maine. She renovated a one-room schoolhouse (The Bell School), designed costumes for The Penobscot Theatre and Maine Shakespeare Festival, founded and runs a quilting business, The Spring Street Co., taught several fiber workshops including, “Freedom through Limits” for the Maine Crafts Association at Haystack, served several years as Board Chairman for The Maine Highlands Guild, is a juried professional member of The Maine Crafts Guild, received the Merit Award for her work “Red Finery” at Daniel Kany Gallery in Portland, honorable mention for her work “White Finery” at National Fiber Directions 2009, acceptance and publication in the Quilt National ’09 International Biennial exhibition and catalog, received a fellowship to the Mildred’s Lane residency program under Mark Dion, Robert Williams, and J. Morgan Puett, and is a recipient of a 2010 MAC Good Idea Grant. Recent shows include: The UMMA I-95 Triennial Invitational Exhibition, Bangor, ME, "An Ordinall of Alchimy" Organized by Mark Dion and Robert Williams for Cabinet Magazine, Brooklyn, NY, and the CMCA 2010 Biennial, Rockport, ME.



Artist's Statement


My work investigates material structures under the assumption that they function as cognitive and moral evidence. I aspire to the actualization of persistent inner visions, patterns, and ideas so that they are achieved in their fullness and expansiveness resolving, through integrity and imagination, complexity and even contradiction. To make true what is true, a material recollection. In this collection of work, Elaborate Hegemonies, I use analogy to pursue a Russian-doll-like epistemology: nested meanings, interpretation-yielding structures, and connectivity.

Elaborate Hegemonies


“Anyone who pays a little attention to the growth of plants will readily observe that certain of their external members are sometimes transformed, so that they assume-either wholly or in some lesser degree - the form of the member nearest in the series.”
-J.W. von Goethe An Attempt to Interpret the Metamorphosis of Plants

The mastermind should not be confused with the vessel. While their outpourings may appear homologous, the apparatus of the mastermind, being more petulant than the equanimous vessel, operationalizes inner-patterns on his material charge and so tends to deliver solids over liquids, fire over air. His mantra:

1. We inhabit the elements to which we best correspond.
2. We have, through thousands of years of accommodation, become so like these elements that when we hold still we are scarcely to be distinguished from our surroundings.
3. Material aggregations are not abstract, but mechanical.
4. Processes are repetitions.
5. Repetition is mechanical.
6. The elaborate is cumulative – mechanically so.
7. The external world is assigned a tempo- in us.
8. Mathematic logic is moral in nature.
9. The assumption that two things are equal seems not quite credible, as a result, sensitivity balks at the equals-symbol, on which virtually everything is now based.
10. All work is the same work; there is always room for more bodies to be thrust in on top, provided they all submit and fall together into an indistinguishable heap and become what I want them to become.
-Gabriella D’Italia

With thanks to: Sandy Boobar, Cameron Crawford, Sheridan Kelley, Rob Phelps, Rylan Shook, and Abigail Stiers
www.gabrielladitalia.com



Listen


Aarhus Artist Abbie Read speaks with Gabriella D'Italia about her work in this show.