What Is Left Behind by Luigia Martelloni
A Bridge for Artists Between Puglia and California / Un Ponte per gli Artisti Tra Puglia e California
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by Carmelo Cipriani, Il Quotidiano di Puglia
Between two Seas is the new exhibition project promoted by the MAAAC of Cisternino, a museum that is among the most active and enterprising in Puglia. Not a simple exhibition but a transnational project that connects Puglia with California through an exchange of artists and events divided into two consequential stages: the first, currently underway in Cisternino, with the US art exhibition, the second, to March 2019 in Los Angeles, with the exhibition of Italian artists (many of them from Puglia) in the Santa Monica Art Studios. A dual event suspended between two seas, the Mediterranean and the Pacific.
At the center of the Atlantic and Indian oceans, depending on the direction you decide to travel, no more insurmountable barriers but new possibilities for meeting and comparison, in the sign of mutual enhancement.
Curated by Luigia Martelloni, an Italian-American artist whose works have been exhibited in international contexts, including the Venice Biennale, the exhibition gathers the works of eighteen artists from the United States, offering a broad spectrum of media and expressive solutions.
The idea of the exhibition - says the curator - was born from some conversations with Alberto Vannetti, artistic director of the MAAAC. The project is to bring the artists present at the MAAAC to exhibit in Los Angeles at the Arena 1 Gallery, inside a hangar in the Santa Monica airport, where I have my studio together with other artists. The project has evolved and a real cultural exchange has been born.
The path, well structured, dialogues with the excavations and the museum structure, creating an osmotic walk within which the works are discovered can show. the title - continues Martelloni - sums up the theme of immigration / emigration. In some ways we are all immigrants or emigrants, but globally we are connected: each of us ends up becoming a bridge between two seas.
Claudia Parducci, Doni Silver Simons and Rachel Grynberg operate in the context of the object re-proposal. They manipulate heterogeneous materials such as fabrics and ropes to give rise to installation solutions, metaphors of existential portraits, wider and more multifaceted, and that of Luigia Martelloni who pays homage to the Pugliese earth through a reflection on its arboreal vegetation, mainly almond and olive trees. Installations are also the slaves of Mara Colecchia, who stages an existential reflection manipulating ceramics, and Gary Palmer, that of the latter and more properly a site-specific pictorial work, in which color and design out of the limits of the support to invade the real space with engaging illusory effects, in a reflection on the relationship between past and present in Cisternino.
On the other hand, the photographs of Jay Mark Johnson, Jeremy Kidd, Osceola Refetoff, Alexo Wandael, mainly focused on the landscape, not just American. Shots that more often than not take direct, others are the obvious result of a reasoned post-production. Poised between photography, painting and digital rehabilitation are the works of Krista Augius, Claudio Santini and Yossi Govrin (creator and director of the SMAS). This one in particular, through the process of printing on canvas, superimposes anthropomorphic elements, anomalous and estranging, on repertory images taken from the history of art, not infrequently altering the original colors.
Sculpture and video are instead the two media adopted by Janine Brown for its installation, one of the most intriguing of the exhibition, in which a female figure is wandering in a claustrophobic primeval landscape while, outside the video, drop-shaped nets simulate a hypertrophic rain. Purely painters - Lynn Aldrich, David Eddington, Deborah Lynn Irmas, Andy Moses, oscillating between informal insights and architectural inclinations. David Eddington, in particular and author of a Telero in which he seems to pay tribute to the Italian space tradition, paraphrasing the architectures of Giotto and Piero della Francesca, passing through Casorati and Carra.
Cisternino (Br): mostra "Between Two Seas/ Southern California meets Southern Italy" / Touring Club Italiano
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Between Two Seas / Southern California meets Southern Italy / Artribune
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