above; one of the works in the show, "Lift off" hand-built and glazed ceramic
Elisa D’Arrigo: Making Moves
Elisa D’Arrigo’s small ceramic sculptures, while not specifically figures, have a presence that suggests living bodies, with arm-like appendages and orifices. The quirky charm of these eccentric objects draws our attention and keeps us looking.
D’Arrigo works improvisationally, allowing the forms to reveal themselves as she creates them. Creating hollow, mostly cylindrical forms from clay slabs, D’Arrigo combines and manipulates them while wet. She thinks of this process as a dialogue with each piece: "I play with these forms, combining, taking apart, recombining; all the while seeking a configuration that speaks to me…I look for something from the piece that I can both recognize yet be surprised by or even become uncomfortable with.”
This dialogue extends to D’Arrigo’s adventurous and experimental glazing process, which often involves numerous layers and refirings. She is especially intrigued by the way glazes can radically transform the character of a piece. The multi-colored and textured surfaces of her sculptures seem almost painterly, with their dots, drips, dimples, streaks, and stripes.
Although these ceramic objects are fixed in place, they embody a kind of tension that implies movement—either arrested, or about to happen. D’Arrigo explains, “the pieces are often taking a stance or in a paused position between moves and their positions record or express my own transitory states of mind." The exhibition title, “Making Moves” might describe the artist’s process in building these works, but it also hints at the movement these inanimate objects might be capable of in our imaginations. As we make our own moves around the sculptures and discover radically different views of each one, we may imagine the pieces moving and transforming before our eyes.
Mary Birmingham, Guest Curator
I'm thrilled to announce this solo exhibition of my work at Pamela Salisbury Gallery. I'm excited to be showing concurrently with Elisa Jensen, Maud Bryt, Steve Bartlett and Rachel Schmidhof. The opening is Saturday July 29, 4-6PM. If you're nearby, please stop in! For more info, please click here
More info here
April 1-May 7 2023
558 ST JOHNS PLACE
Pictured above: "Above and Below" 1993 36 x 70 x 15 inches, cloth, wire, steel rod, acrylic paints and mediums, pigments
This exhibition presented Elisa D’Arrigo’s sculptural work from the 1990s and early 2000s, and recent prints by Mildred Beltré. Since 2010 D'Arrigo has made and exhibited ceramic work that explores improvisational process, thickly glazed surfaces, and animated sculptural form within the context of the ceramic vessel. A strong correlation exists between the earlier mixed media works in the exhibition at FiveMyles and the artist’s current ceramic sculptures. The most obvious continuance lies in the mysteries each one of D’Arrigo’s works implies. Are they artifacts left behind by an earlier, alien civilization? Are they emotions transformed into clay, rope, wire, cloth or stitches? These works very much engage us with the physical process of art making: the relationship between labor and time, the tension between weight and gravity.
The most recent of these works, the wall piece Time and Time Again (2005) takes its strength from the irregularity of the grid, the anxious restlessness of thousands of stitches and the soothing shades of the black and gray of the fabric, repurposed from clothing worn by D’Arrigo’s family over the years. It is the relentless action of the hand making these stitches that adds the weight of time to this work.
An earlier work, the floor sculpture First Frost 2 (1992), with its dense bud-like center and trailing stem approximates a botanical fragment lying on a field; something both from nature and hand-made. Its exposed ribbed structure of coated wire looks organic, like woven vines. But the mystery of its origin is lightened by the hand that lets you feel its work – patting the clay in place, entwining a part of the sculpture with rope. For each of the five sculptures in the exhibition the hand is their great collaborator.
Mildred Beltré produces prints and drawings using abstracted personal imagery. Coating paper with walnut ink that she makes herself, Beltre uses photographic information filtered through the language of the dot pattern. The artist explores questions of proximity and perception: the closer you are to the image, the more difficult it is to see it. And the further away you are from it, the more you can discern the details, and perhaps the identity of the image.
Beltré, a printmaker by training, also makes white line woodcuts. White line woodcuts are characterized by their white outlines around shapes, as well as their soft colors. To create a woodcut in this manner, Beltre hand-colors and prints each shape. It is an iterative on-going process of painting and printing, until the image is completed.
Please email hanne@fivemyles.org, or call 718-783-4438.
NOW CLOSED: This piece (Both Sides Now (2) 2021 8 x 9.5 x 7 in) was included in "Absurd Petunias", an 4 artist exhibition (Nov 5-Dec 31 2022), at the beautiful new LA location of Patricia Sweetow Gallery. Other participating artists: Cornelia Shulz, Joachim Bandau, and Monica Rezman. To read a review of the show by Julia Couzens please click here
Elizabeth Harris Gallery 529 west 20th St. NY NY 10011 hours: Tuesday-Saturday 12-6PM And by appointment. For more information contact Miles Manning: 212-463-9666
info@ehgallery.com
Thrilled and grateful to be included in this show, which marks the third major gift of ceramics to the museum from esteemed and visionary collector, Robert A. Ellison. Pictured is "Sidestepper", one of my works on view in the exhibition.
press release
elisa d’arrigo
in the moment
march 30-may 11, 2019
opening reception: sat, march 30, 3-6pm
catalog available
with essay by Nancy Princenthal
Sat, April 13, 3:30-5pm: Conversation with Elisa D'Arrigo and Nancy Princenthal as one of the events celebrating the 25th anniversary of Civitella Ranieri -Civitella XXV #3
The Elizabeth Harris Gallery is pleased to announce in the moment, a show of recent ceramics by Elisa D’Arrigo. In this exhibition, her 10th with the gallery, D’Arrigo continues to consider and expands upon the possibilities for integrating painting, drawing, improvisational process and animated sculptural form within the context of the ceramic vessel.
The works begin as variously sized hollow and hand-built cylindrical forms that the artist then manipulates and combines while wet, in a period of intense activity. The “postures” that result allude to the body in a gestural and even visceral manner. They exude a figural presence, and their hollowness evokes the notion of interiority, and animation from within. The artist has stated that she is compelled by the way we inhabit and imagine our bodies from the inside out, and by the psychological and corporeal aspects of containment. The inside creates the outside, and visa versa.
D’Arrigo’s penchant for in the moment decisions yields forms that seem surprising, yet oddly familiar. The works convey the intrinsic humor of unexpected asymmetries merged with densely glazed “surfaces that run with an impossible wealth of color, pattern and texture...Variously nubby and scaly, striated and pocked, the resulting surfaces evoke polished gemstones, luster glass, patterned knits and flesh both tender pink and charred, mineral black.” (Excerpted from accompanying catalog essay by Nancy Princenthal).
Princenthal describes the works as a “series of alarmingly potent little ceramic figures that engage our propensities for reverie, humor and, perhaps most satisfying, deep human recognition.”
D’Arrigo’s work is included in the collections of The Mead Art Museum, The High Museum of Art, The Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, The Mint Museum of Art and Design, The Weatherspoon Art Museum, and Dieu Donne Papermill. Reviews of her work have appeared in several publications including Hyperallergic, The New York Times, Art in America, ArtNews, Sculpture, Partisan Review, ArtPapers, and The New York Observer. Residencies include Civitella Ranieri, Yaddo, and the MacDowell Colony.
The Gallery is located at 529 W 20th Street, 6th floor, New York, NY 10011 and is open Tuesday – Saturday 11 – 6 pm.
For further information contact Miles Manning at 212-463-9666.
www.ehgallery.com
info@ehgallery.com
Photo credit: Adam Reich
A THOROUGH EXPLORATION OF THE INFLUENCE OF A TRADITIONAL SKILL OF THE ITALIAN DIASPORA
For Italian immigrants
and their descendants, needlework represents a marker of identity, a cultural
touchstone as powerful as pasta and Neapolitan music. Out of the artifacts of
their memory and imagination, Italian immigrants and their descendants used embroidering,
sewing, knitting, and crocheting to help define who they were and who they have
become. This book is an interdisciplinary collection of creative work by
authors of Italian origin and academic essays. The creative works from
thirty-seven contributors include memoir, poetry, and visual arts while the
collection as a whole explores a multitude of experiences about and approaches
to needlework and immigration from a transnational perspective, spanning the
late nineteenth century to the late twentieth century.
At the center of the
book, over thirty illustrations represent Italian immigrant women's needlework.
The text reveals the many processes by which a simple object, or even the
memory of that object, becomes something else through literary, visual,
performance, ethnographic, or critical reimagining. While primarily concerned
with interpretations of needlework rather than the needlework itself, the
editors and contributors to Embroidered Stories remain mindful of its
history and its associated cultural values, which Italian immigrants brought
with them to the United States, Canada, Australia, and Argentina and passed on
to their descendants.
Contributions by B.
Amore, Mary Jo Bona, Phyllis Capello, Rosette Capotorto, Jo Ann Cavallo,
Hwei-Fe'n Cheah, Paola Corso, Peter Covino, Barbara Crooker, Elisa D'Arrigo,
Louise DeSalvo, Bettina Favero, Marisa Frasca, Donna R. Gabaccia, Sandra M.
Gilbert, Maria Mazziotti Gillan, Lucia Grillo, Maria Grillo, Karen Guancione,
Jennifer Guglielmo, Joanna Clapps Herman, Joseph Inguanti, Annie Rachele
Lanzillotto, Anne Marie Macari, Giuliana Mammucari, Giovanna Miceli Jeffries,
Denise Calvetti Michaels, Lia Ottaviano, Gianna Patriarca, Joan L. Saverino,
Maria Terrone, Tiziana Rinaldi Castro, Angela Valeria, Ilaria Vann, Lisa
Venditelli, Paul Zarzyski, Christine F. Zinni
EDVIGE GIUNTA, Teaneck,
New Jersey, is professor of English at New Jersey City University. She is the
author of Writing with an Accent: Contemporary Italian American Women
Authors and coeditor of Teaching Italian American Literature, Film, and
Popular Culture and The Milk of Almonds: Italian American Women Writers
on Food and Culture. JOSEPH SCIORRA, Brooklyn, New York, is the associate
director for academic and cultural programs at the John D. Calandra Italian
American Institute, Queens College. He is editor of the journal Italian
American Review and the book Italian Folk: Vernacular Culture in
Italian-American Lives.
304 PAGES (APPROX.), 6 X
9 INCHES, 30 B&W PHOTOGRAPHS, INTRODUCTION, INDEX