Young Voices Sing to Creation
Featuring works by: Antonius Bui, Heather Dorsett, and Emma Kisiel
Guest Curator: Trudi Ludwig Johnson
May 25 – August 19, 2016
Reception and Artist Talk: Thursday July 14, 2016, 4:00pm – 5:00pm
To see more images of the exhibition visit our Flickr Gallery.
- “Look at everything as though you are seeing it for the first time, with eyes of a child, fresh with wonder.” Joseph Cornell
These words, from a letter in Unfolding, echo the working practices of artists Maria-Theresa Fernandes, Cianne Fragione and Nicole Salimbene. Using poetic combinations of ordinary and unexpected materials they make resonant objects that invite us to look closely, and to sense the extraordinary within the familiar.
All three artists incorporate words—poetry, letters, graffiti-like marks—into their work. The Silhouette series by Fernandes explores the history of Baltimore, where she lives and has a studio. Combining stitching, collage and digital photography, she crafts book covers into richly tactile layers of imagery and text. Ann Maria Weems is a collaboration with a local poet recalling the 1885 escape of a slave via the Rockville Underground Railroad and the 2015 riots in Baltimore.
A sense of place and memory are also present in the mixed media work of Fragione. Referencing Southern Italy, cultural identity and “the deep, unspoken textures of daily life that expose themselves only gradually”, her large-scale assemblages and small reliquary purses hint at tantalizing secrets. Di Colonia Marscialla is made of oil paint, artist drawings, text, gold leaf, textiles, Conté crayon, a perfume bottle, crystals, metal, and copper nails attached to a wood panel. The contents from a dainty handbag (and a life?) are layered with expressive marks and the artist’s handwriting, like accretions on an ancient wall.
Salimbene’s installation Unfolding invites viewers to sit in the artist-built environment and open an envelope with a poem, text or image inside. Semi-transparent envelopes line the opposite wall, containing handwritten letters, thread, seeds and maps; visual metaphors for the interior and exterior materials of our lives. Pictures of water are projected onto the facing wall, hinting at the metaphorical flowing of ideas and our changing relationship with the environment. In this contemplative space we are asked to reflect on the wisdom currently unfolding within our lives.
---Kiki McGrath, Curator, Dadian Gallery
- Maria-Theresa Fernandes
I was born in Kenya and lived there for 21 years. At the time, there was little opportunity to study art. I decided to go to London to attend Art College. My foundation course was at Sir John Cass College, London. I obtained My B.A. (Hons) degree at the Metropolitan University of Manchester, England in Textiles with Embroidery as the major discipline. The UK is one of the few countries in the world to offer this degree. Embroidery is now under the umbrella of the Textiles Department and not as a separate discipline as it was in the past. Textiles, let alone embroidery, was considered to be a women’s craft and frowned upon when I was a student in the late 60s and early 70s.
During the 2000s, I was surprised to find an exhibition at the Crafts Council of Great Britain in London entitled “Men Who Sew.” What a title, I thought! Men sew in various parts of the world, like India, Africa; it is part of their lives. However, women sew and create work, but were not treated as “artists” in their own right for a long time.
I continue to do my art and allow for the challenges and new rapidly growing technology. In the early 70’s, I lived in Belfast, Northern Ireland when the Irish Republican Army ran rampant. The stay was brief, but posed for new work addressing the turmoil in Ulster. In 1981, I moved to the USA and worked on a part-time basis as an artist-in-residence in several states, including Utah, Idaho, Nevada (including the Indian Reservations), Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, South Carolina and Kentucky. I have also served international residencies in the United Kingdom, Nigeria, Spain and France.
Travel and social landscapes serve to build the solid repository from which I draw my inspiration. As a recipient of the Charles and Fleur Bresler Award this year, I am, at present, an artist-in-residence at VisArts in Rockville, Maryland.
Artist's Statement
Sense of place, time and memory are the keystones to my life and work. These journeys have provided me with limitless resources, both visual and emotional from which inspiration and spiritual satisfaction is drawn. The experiences have allowed for diverse societal mores, which over time have found their way into a number of works.
Travel and social landscapes have served to build the solid repository from which I draw inspiration. The process depends heavily upon embracing life experiences, living and immersing myself in the seemingly endless kaleidoscope of cultures has helped me realize that “being there” and taking part trumps any artificial portrayals I could have conjured.
My work is mixed media with a strong emphasis on stitch using images digital photographed and collage. The subject of “Place” is an important element of the work. The works presented relate to the Uprising last year in Baltimore City and the disparity between the rich and poor neighborhoods.
Recent work includes one of a kind prints that are manipulated with stitch and collage. These prints evolved from the initial works that resulted from the death of Freddie Gray in 2015 in Baltimore City. Included is also a collaborative work with poet Stephen Pohl that is recent (2017) and relates to Ann Maria Weems who escaped from Rockville on the Underground Railroad in 1855. The book cover includes handmade paper, collage and text.
www.saatchiart.com/Maria-Theresa - Cianne Fragione
My art has appeared in solo, group, and traveling exhibitions in the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Cincinnati, Baltimore, Washington, DC, and Louisville, among others. Internationally I have shown in Italy, as well as in Sofia, Bulgaria (2012-15) and Vilnius, Lithuania, with the State Department’s Art in Embassies program. Recent solos: Pocket Full of Promises, Anne Wright Wilson Gallery, Georgetown College, Georgetown, KY (2015), Cecelia Coker Bell Gallery, Coker College (2017) and will be traveling to Five Points Gallery, Torrington Ct (2018), My Haiku, Gateway Art Center, Brentwood, MD (2015). Group exhibitions: Circle of Friends, in conjunction with Renee Stout: Tales of the Conjure Women, and Art Cart: Honoring the Legacy, both at Katzen Art Center, American University, Washington, DC (2016), Gallery Neptune and Brown, Ladies First, Washington, DC (2016); University of Mary Washington Galleries, Fredericksburg, VA, Mid-Atlantic New Painting (2016;) John D. Calandra Italian American Institute of Queens College, CUNY, Lo Studio dei Nipoti: Four Artists, Manhattan (2013); Parco Nazonale della Sila, Monastero di Villaggio Mancuso-Taverna, Arte Visiva Per L’Europa, Calabria, Italy (2012; and The Textile Museum Green: The Color and the Cause, Washington, DC (2011). Many have been accompanied by publications. I was nominated for the Anonymous was a Women Award in 2016 for my artistic achievement. Awarded: The Legacy Project (Art Cart: Saving the Legacy for 2015-16, Research Center for Arts & Culture, NYC, and sponsored by Joan Mitchell Foundation, NYC; documentation of life’s work available for research at Columbia University NY); Artist-in-Residence, Lo Studio dei Nipoti, Monasterace, Italy. Recent collections: DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, Art Bank Selection; Cecil H. Green Library, Department of Special Collections, Stanford University, Stanford, CA; Georgetown College Permanent Collection, Georgetown, KY. I am represented by Gallery Neptune and Brown, Washington DC.
Artist Statement
My art is process-oriented, and I am always seeking unexpected, poetic ways of combining found and fine art materials — a practice that comes in part from years of living in the San Francisco Bay Area, where I encountered a number of the Beat-era and funk artists associated with the region and was deeply touched by their work. In combinations of oil paint, drawing materials, collage, and a wide, unpredictable range of found assemblage objects, I strive to uncover the intimate, revelatory interactions that can occur between our individual and cultural identities, and between our specific natural and human-made landscapes. The material handling, mark-making, and visual effects are further informed by an ingrained sensitivity to physical movement that draws on my early professional career in dance: as a dancer, I learned to extend outward from my “center” into the area around me, an invisible, inferred extension of my body based on the stage as a creative working space. In the artwork, the sheet of paper is the stage, the space in which movement brings forth experiences and landscapes and how they feel to me in memory.
In the studio, I tend to work in series. These may be continuous or intermittent, and when several series encounter one another chronologically, they often overlap, and in doing so, can yield fresh, surprising, or unanticipated connections that exist between the themes and materials. The Immacolata series developed alongside a series of small assemblage works, Pocket full of Promises series, and as the two began to emerge together, the heavyweight paper became a gathering site for potential material. Each of these sheets started to take on its own appearance and identity as a work, and it soon claimed its identity as a separate but related series: such constructive methods grow from my interest in Cy Twombly and the Italian artists Mimmo Rotella and Gastone Novelli, who also use graffiti-like marks, writing, paint, collage, and scraps of found imagery from a wide variety of sources.
Furthermore, these series similarly embodies the combination of revelation and secrecy that I value. The title refers to my extended, often mysterious, deeply affective encounters with the village processions of Calabria that occurred several years ago while I was residing in Southern Italy, and so the series may be regarded as the present remembering and contemplating deeply and at length on those weeks and months, through the thoughts and images come to the surface, bringing with them gestures, glances, landscapes and skies, the lovely walls of the medieval towns, life moving within the ebb and flow of Sicilian time, its enigmas, its intricate communal intimacy, the deep, unspoken textures of daily life that expose themselves only gradually — a truly human experience whose essence I hope to convey here.
www.ciannefragione.com
- Nicole Salimbene (b. Trinidad, CO) was raised in Niagara Falls, NY and is now a Washington, D.C. based interdisciplinary artist working at the intersection of poetics, psychology, environmentalism and contemplative practice. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in English from the University of Northern Colorado, and has worked in the social service fields and as an administrator in the performing arts. In 2007, she began exhibiting her art, with her first group exhibitions taking place in Nogent sur Oise and Montataire, France. She has continued to exhibit her work in various venues, including the New Orleans Photo Alliance, (e) merge Art Fair, Arlington Arts Center, New York Affordable Art Market, and New Image Gallery at James Madison University. Her 2016 solo exhibition at Flashpoint Gallery (D.C.) received recognition from The Art Newspaper (London), Washington Post, Al Tashkeel (Dubai), and Sculpture Magazine. In addition, her work has been reproduced for publications and purchased for private collections. She was a recipient of an Individual Artists and Scholars Grant from the Arts and Humanities Council of Montgomery County. In 2012, the Washington Sculptors Group awarded her the Tom Rooney Prize. She also has led workshops in art as a contemplative practice in affiliation with American University, Clark University, James Madison University, the Lama Foundation, The Center for Contemplative Mind in Society, and Ghost Ranch.
Artist's Statement
Unfolding is an interactive installation contemplating the unfolding wisdom found in internal and external materials. Viewers are invited to step into the artist-built environment for an intimate look, and to sit at the ironing-board-transformed-desk, opening the envelopes placed there. Inside the envelopes, poems/quotes/images are intended to further examine the connections between the ordinary and sublime objects and gestures presented within the installation, as well as, for the viewers to embody the metaphor of folding and unfolding. The relational poetics examined within this piece hopes to inspire reflection and dialogue on the wisdom currently being revealed within each person.
Unfolding, water, earth, roots, pitcher, glasses, cement, medicine cabinet, ironing boards, desk chair, lunch box, glassine envelopes, maps, silk thread, mustard seeds, lima bean seeds, dictionary pages, projected images, acrylic paint, spray paint, paper, bone folder, 2017
www.nicolesalimbene.com
- For more information about the exhibit please see our Exhibition Brochure
“Look at everything as though you are seeing it for the first time, with eyes of a child, fresh with wonder.” Joseph Cornell
These words, from a letter in Unfolding, echo the working practices of artists Maria-Theresa Fernandes, Cianne Fragione and Nicole Salimbene. Using poetic combinations of ordinary and unexpected materials they make resonant objects that invite us to look closely, and to sense the extraordinary within the familiar.
All three artists incorporate words—poetry, letters, graffiti-like marks—into their work. The Silhouette series by Fernandes explores the history of Baltimore, where she lives and has a studio. Combining stitching, collage and digital photography, she crafts book covers into richly tactile layers of imagery and text. Ann Maria Weems is a collaboration with a local poet recalling the 1885 escape of a slave via the Rockville Underground Railroad and the 2015 riots in Baltimore.
A sense of place and memory are also present in the mixed media work of Fragione. Referencing Southern Italy, cultural identity and “the deep, unspoken textures of daily life that expose themselves only gradually”, her large-scale assemblages and small reliquary purses hint at tantalizing secrets. Di Colonia Marscialla is made of oil paint, artist drawings, text, gold leaf, textiles, Conté crayon, a perfume bottle, crystals, metal, and copper nails attached to a wood panel. The contents from a dainty handbag (and a life?) are layered with expressive marks and the artist’s handwriting, like accretions on an ancient wall.
Salimbene’s installation Unfolding invites viewers to sit in the artist-built environment and open an envelope with a poem, text or image inside. Semi-transparent envelopes line the opposite wall, containing handwritten letters, thread, seeds and maps; visual metaphors for the interior and exterior materials of our lives. Pictures of water are projected onto the facing wall, hinting at the metaphorical flowing of ideas and our changing relationship with the environment. In this contemplative space we are asked to reflect on the wisdom currently unfolding within our lives.
These words, from a letter in Unfolding, echo the working practices of artists Maria-Theresa Fernandes, Cianne Fragione and Nicole Salimbene. Using poetic combinations of ordinary and unexpected materials they make resonant objects that invite us to look closely, and to sense the extraordinary within the familiar.
All three artists incorporate words—poetry, letters, graffiti-like marks—into their work. The Silhouette series by Fernandes explores the history of Baltimore, where she lives and has a studio. Combining stitching, collage and digital photography, she crafts book covers into richly tactile layers of imagery and text. Ann Maria Weems is a collaboration with a local poet recalling the 1885 escape of a slave via the Rockville Underground Railroad and the 2015 riots in Baltimore.
A sense of place and memory are also present in the mixed media work of Fragione. Referencing Southern Italy, cultural identity and “the deep, unspoken textures of daily life that expose themselves only gradually”, her large-scale assemblages and small reliquary purses hint at tantalizing secrets. Di Colonia Marscialla is made of oil paint, artist drawings, text, gold leaf, textiles, Conté crayon, a perfume bottle, crystals, metal, and copper nails attached to a wood panel. The contents from a dainty handbag (and a life?) are layered with expressive marks and the artist’s handwriting, like accretions on an ancient wall.
Salimbene’s installation Unfolding invites viewers to sit in the artist-built environment and open an envelope with a poem, text or image inside. Semi-transparent envelopes line the opposite wall, containing handwritten letters, thread, seeds and maps; visual metaphors for the interior and exterior materials of our lives. Pictures of water are projected onto the facing wall, hinting at the metaphorical flowing of ideas and our changing relationship with the environment. In this contemplative space we are asked to reflect on the wisdom currently unfolding within our lives.
---Kiki McGrath, Curator, Dadian Gallery
Maria-Theresa Fernandes
I was born in Kenya and lived there for 21 years. At the time, there was little opportunity to study art. I decided to go to London to attend Art College. My foundation course was at Sir John Cass College, London. I obtained My B.A. (Hons) degree at the Metropolitan University of Manchester, England in Textiles with Embroidery as the major discipline. The UK is one of the few countries in the world to offer this degree. Embroidery is now under the umbrella of the Textiles Department and not as a separate discipline as it was in the past. Textiles, let alone embroidery, was considered to be a women’s craft and frowned upon when I was a student in the late 60s and early 70s.
During the 2000s, I was surprised to find an exhibition at the Crafts Council of Great Britain in London entitled “Men Who Sew.” What a title, I thought! Men sew in various parts of the world, like India, Africa; it is part of their lives. However, women sew and create work, but were not treated as “artists” in their own right for a long time.
I continue to do my art and allow for the challenges and new rapidly growing technology. In the early 70’s, I lived in Belfast, Northern Ireland when the Irish Republican Army ran rampant. The stay was brief, but posed for new work addressing the turmoil in Ulster. In 1981, I moved to the USA and worked on a part-time basis as an artist-in-residence in several states, including Utah, Idaho, Nevada (including the Indian Reservations), Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, South Carolina and Kentucky. I have also served international residencies in the United Kingdom, Nigeria, Spain and France.
Travel and social landscapes serve to build the solid repository from which I draw my inspiration. As a recipient of the Charles and Fleur Bresler Award this year, I am, at present, an artist-in-residence at VisArts in Rockville, Maryland.
Artist's Statement
Sense of place, time and memory are the keystones to my life and work. These journeys have provided me with limitless resources, both visual and emotional from which inspiration and spiritual satisfaction is drawn. The experiences have allowed for diverse societal mores, which over time have found their way into a number of works.
Travel and social landscapes have served to build the solid repository from which I draw inspiration. The process depends heavily upon embracing life experiences, living and immersing myself in the seemingly endless kaleidoscope of cultures has helped me realize that “being there” and taking part trumps any artificial portrayals I could have conjured.
My work is mixed media with a strong emphasis on stitch using images digital photographed and collage. The subject of “Place” is an important element of the work. The works presented relate to the Uprising last year in Baltimore City and the disparity between the rich and poor neighborhoods.
Recent work includes one of a kind prints that are manipulated with stitch and collage. These prints evolved from the initial works that resulted from the death of Freddie Gray in 2015 in Baltimore City. Included is also a collaborative work with poet Stephen Pohl that is recent (2017) and relates to Ann Maria Weems who escaped from Rockville on the Underground Railroad in 1855. The book cover includes handmade paper, collage and text.
www.saatchiart.com/Maria-Theresa
I was born in Kenya and lived there for 21 years. At the time, there was little opportunity to study art. I decided to go to London to attend Art College. My foundation course was at Sir John Cass College, London. I obtained My B.A. (Hons) degree at the Metropolitan University of Manchester, England in Textiles with Embroidery as the major discipline. The UK is one of the few countries in the world to offer this degree. Embroidery is now under the umbrella of the Textiles Department and not as a separate discipline as it was in the past. Textiles, let alone embroidery, was considered to be a women’s craft and frowned upon when I was a student in the late 60s and early 70s.
During the 2000s, I was surprised to find an exhibition at the Crafts Council of Great Britain in London entitled “Men Who Sew.” What a title, I thought! Men sew in various parts of the world, like India, Africa; it is part of their lives. However, women sew and create work, but were not treated as “artists” in their own right for a long time.
I continue to do my art and allow for the challenges and new rapidly growing technology. In the early 70’s, I lived in Belfast, Northern Ireland when the Irish Republican Army ran rampant. The stay was brief, but posed for new work addressing the turmoil in Ulster. In 1981, I moved to the USA and worked on a part-time basis as an artist-in-residence in several states, including Utah, Idaho, Nevada (including the Indian Reservations), Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, South Carolina and Kentucky. I have also served international residencies in the United Kingdom, Nigeria, Spain and France.
Travel and social landscapes serve to build the solid repository from which I draw my inspiration. As a recipient of the Charles and Fleur Bresler Award this year, I am, at present, an artist-in-residence at VisArts in Rockville, Maryland.
Artist's Statement
Sense of place, time and memory are the keystones to my life and work. These journeys have provided me with limitless resources, both visual and emotional from which inspiration and spiritual satisfaction is drawn. The experiences have allowed for diverse societal mores, which over time have found their way into a number of works.
Travel and social landscapes have served to build the solid repository from which I draw inspiration. The process depends heavily upon embracing life experiences, living and immersing myself in the seemingly endless kaleidoscope of cultures has helped me realize that “being there” and taking part trumps any artificial portrayals I could have conjured.
My work is mixed media with a strong emphasis on stitch using images digital photographed and collage. The subject of “Place” is an important element of the work. The works presented relate to the Uprising last year in Baltimore City and the disparity between the rich and poor neighborhoods.
Recent work includes one of a kind prints that are manipulated with stitch and collage. These prints evolved from the initial works that resulted from the death of Freddie Gray in 2015 in Baltimore City. Included is also a collaborative work with poet Stephen Pohl that is recent (2017) and relates to Ann Maria Weems who escaped from Rockville on the Underground Railroad in 1855. The book cover includes handmade paper, collage and text.
www.saatchiart.com/Maria-Theresa
Cianne Fragione
My art has appeared in solo, group, and traveling exhibitions in the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Cincinnati, Baltimore, Washington, DC, and Louisville, among others. Internationally I have shown in Italy, as well as in Sofia, Bulgaria (2012-15) and Vilnius, Lithuania, with the State Department’s Art in Embassies program. Recent solos: Pocket Full of Promises, Anne Wright Wilson Gallery, Georgetown College, Georgetown, KY (2015), Cecelia Coker Bell Gallery, Coker College (2017) and will be traveling to Five Points Gallery, Torrington Ct (2018), My Haiku, Gateway Art Center, Brentwood, MD (2015). Group exhibitions: Circle of Friends, in conjunction with Renee Stout: Tales of the Conjure Women, and Art Cart: Honoring the Legacy, both at Katzen Art Center, American University, Washington, DC (2016), Gallery Neptune and Brown, Ladies First, Washington, DC (2016); University of Mary Washington Galleries, Fredericksburg, VA, Mid-Atlantic New Painting (2016;) John D. Calandra Italian American Institute of Queens College, CUNY, Lo Studio dei Nipoti: Four Artists, Manhattan (2013); Parco Nazonale della Sila, Monastero di Villaggio Mancuso-Taverna, Arte Visiva Per L’Europa, Calabria, Italy (2012; and The Textile Museum Green: The Color and the Cause, Washington, DC (2011). Many have been accompanied by publications. I was nominated for the Anonymous was a Women Award in 2016 for my artistic achievement. Awarded: The Legacy Project (Art Cart: Saving the Legacy for 2015-16, Research Center for Arts & Culture, NYC, and sponsored by Joan Mitchell Foundation, NYC; documentation of life’s work available for research at Columbia University NY); Artist-in-Residence, Lo Studio dei Nipoti, Monasterace, Italy. Recent collections: DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, Art Bank Selection; Cecil H. Green Library, Department of Special Collections, Stanford University, Stanford, CA; Georgetown College Permanent Collection, Georgetown, KY. I am represented by Gallery Neptune and Brown, Washington DC.
Artist Statement
My art is process-oriented, and I am always seeking unexpected, poetic ways of combining found and fine art materials — a practice that comes in part from years of living in the San Francisco Bay Area, where I encountered a number of the Beat-era and funk artists associated with the region and was deeply touched by their work. In combinations of oil paint, drawing materials, collage, and a wide, unpredictable range of found assemblage objects, I strive to uncover the intimate, revelatory interactions that can occur between our individual and cultural identities, and between our specific natural and human-made landscapes. The material handling, mark-making, and visual effects are further informed by an ingrained sensitivity to physical movement that draws on my early professional career in dance: as a dancer, I learned to extend outward from my “center” into the area around me, an invisible, inferred extension of my body based on the stage as a creative working space. In the artwork, the sheet of paper is the stage, the space in which movement brings forth experiences and landscapes and how they feel to me in memory.
In the studio, I tend to work in series. These may be continuous or intermittent, and when several series encounter one another chronologically, they often overlap, and in doing so, can yield fresh, surprising, or unanticipated connections that exist between the themes and materials. The Immacolata series developed alongside a series of small assemblage works, Pocket full of Promises series, and as the two began to emerge together, the heavyweight paper became a gathering site for potential material. Each of these sheets started to take on its own appearance and identity as a work, and it soon claimed its identity as a separate but related series: such constructive methods grow from my interest in Cy Twombly and the Italian artists Mimmo Rotella and Gastone Novelli, who also use graffiti-like marks, writing, paint, collage, and scraps of found imagery from a wide variety of sources.
Furthermore, these series similarly embodies the combination of revelation and secrecy that I value. The title refers to my extended, often mysterious, deeply affective encounters with the village processions of Calabria that occurred several years ago while I was residing in Southern Italy, and so the series may be regarded as the present remembering and contemplating deeply and at length on those weeks and months, through the thoughts and images come to the surface, bringing with them gestures, glances, landscapes and skies, the lovely walls of the medieval towns, life moving within the ebb and flow of Sicilian time, its enigmas, its intricate communal intimacy, the deep, unspoken textures of daily life that expose themselves only gradually — a truly human experience whose essence I hope to convey here.
www.ciannefragione.com
My art has appeared in solo, group, and traveling exhibitions in the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Cincinnati, Baltimore, Washington, DC, and Louisville, among others. Internationally I have shown in Italy, as well as in Sofia, Bulgaria (2012-15) and Vilnius, Lithuania, with the State Department’s Art in Embassies program. Recent solos: Pocket Full of Promises, Anne Wright Wilson Gallery, Georgetown College, Georgetown, KY (2015), Cecelia Coker Bell Gallery, Coker College (2017) and will be traveling to Five Points Gallery, Torrington Ct (2018), My Haiku, Gateway Art Center, Brentwood, MD (2015). Group exhibitions: Circle of Friends, in conjunction with Renee Stout: Tales of the Conjure Women, and Art Cart: Honoring the Legacy, both at Katzen Art Center, American University, Washington, DC (2016), Gallery Neptune and Brown, Ladies First, Washington, DC (2016); University of Mary Washington Galleries, Fredericksburg, VA, Mid-Atlantic New Painting (2016;) John D. Calandra Italian American Institute of Queens College, CUNY, Lo Studio dei Nipoti: Four Artists, Manhattan (2013); Parco Nazonale della Sila, Monastero di Villaggio Mancuso-Taverna, Arte Visiva Per L’Europa, Calabria, Italy (2012; and The Textile Museum Green: The Color and the Cause, Washington, DC (2011). Many have been accompanied by publications. I was nominated for the Anonymous was a Women Award in 2016 for my artistic achievement. Awarded: The Legacy Project (Art Cart: Saving the Legacy for 2015-16, Research Center for Arts & Culture, NYC, and sponsored by Joan Mitchell Foundation, NYC; documentation of life’s work available for research at Columbia University NY); Artist-in-Residence, Lo Studio dei Nipoti, Monasterace, Italy. Recent collections: DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, Art Bank Selection; Cecil H. Green Library, Department of Special Collections, Stanford University, Stanford, CA; Georgetown College Permanent Collection, Georgetown, KY. I am represented by Gallery Neptune and Brown, Washington DC.
Artist Statement
My art is process-oriented, and I am always seeking unexpected, poetic ways of combining found and fine art materials — a practice that comes in part from years of living in the San Francisco Bay Area, where I encountered a number of the Beat-era and funk artists associated with the region and was deeply touched by their work. In combinations of oil paint, drawing materials, collage, and a wide, unpredictable range of found assemblage objects, I strive to uncover the intimate, revelatory interactions that can occur between our individual and cultural identities, and between our specific natural and human-made landscapes. The material handling, mark-making, and visual effects are further informed by an ingrained sensitivity to physical movement that draws on my early professional career in dance: as a dancer, I learned to extend outward from my “center” into the area around me, an invisible, inferred extension of my body based on the stage as a creative working space. In the artwork, the sheet of paper is the stage, the space in which movement brings forth experiences and landscapes and how they feel to me in memory.
In the studio, I tend to work in series. These may be continuous or intermittent, and when several series encounter one another chronologically, they often overlap, and in doing so, can yield fresh, surprising, or unanticipated connections that exist between the themes and materials. The Immacolata series developed alongside a series of small assemblage works, Pocket full of Promises series, and as the two began to emerge together, the heavyweight paper became a gathering site for potential material. Each of these sheets started to take on its own appearance and identity as a work, and it soon claimed its identity as a separate but related series: such constructive methods grow from my interest in Cy Twombly and the Italian artists Mimmo Rotella and Gastone Novelli, who also use graffiti-like marks, writing, paint, collage, and scraps of found imagery from a wide variety of sources.
Furthermore, these series similarly embodies the combination of revelation and secrecy that I value. The title refers to my extended, often mysterious, deeply affective encounters with the village processions of Calabria that occurred several years ago while I was residing in Southern Italy, and so the series may be regarded as the present remembering and contemplating deeply and at length on those weeks and months, through the thoughts and images come to the surface, bringing with them gestures, glances, landscapes and skies, the lovely walls of the medieval towns, life moving within the ebb and flow of Sicilian time, its enigmas, its intricate communal intimacy, the deep, unspoken textures of daily life that expose themselves only gradually — a truly human experience whose essence I hope to convey here.
www.ciannefragione.com
Nicole Salimbene (b. Trinidad, CO) was raised in Niagara Falls, NY and is now a Washington, D.C. based interdisciplinary artist working at the intersection of poetics, psychology, environmentalism and contemplative practice. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in English from the University of Northern Colorado, and has worked in the social service fields and as an administrator in the performing arts. In 2007, she began exhibiting her art, with her first group exhibitions taking place in Nogent sur Oise and Montataire, France. She has continued to exhibit her work in various venues, including the New Orleans Photo Alliance, (e) merge Art Fair, Arlington Arts Center, New York Affordable Art Market, and New Image Gallery at James Madison University. Her 2016 solo exhibition at Flashpoint Gallery (D.C.) received recognition from The Art Newspaper (London), Washington Post, Al Tashkeel (Dubai), and Sculpture Magazine. In addition, her work has been reproduced for publications and purchased for private collections. She was a recipient of an Individual Artists and Scholars Grant from the Arts and Humanities Council of Montgomery County. In 2012, the Washington Sculptors Group awarded her the Tom Rooney Prize. She also has led workshops in art as a contemplative practice in affiliation with American University, Clark University, James Madison University, the Lama Foundation, The Center for Contemplative Mind in Society, and Ghost Ranch.
Artist's Statement
Unfolding is an interactive installation contemplating the unfolding wisdom found in internal and external materials. Viewers are invited to step into the artist-built environment for an intimate look, and to sit at the ironing-board-transformed-desk, opening the envelopes placed there. Inside the envelopes, poems/quotes/images are intended to further examine the connections between the ordinary and sublime objects and gestures presented within the installation, as well as, for the viewers to embody the metaphor of folding and unfolding. The relational poetics examined within this piece hopes to inspire reflection and dialogue on the wisdom currently being revealed within each person.
Unfolding, water, earth, roots, pitcher, glasses, cement, medicine cabinet, ironing boards, desk chair, lunch box, glassine envelopes, maps, silk thread, mustard seeds, lima bean seeds, dictionary pages, projected images, acrylic paint, spray paint, paper, bone folder, 2017
www.nicolesalimbene.com
Artist's Statement
Unfolding is an interactive installation contemplating the unfolding wisdom found in internal and external materials. Viewers are invited to step into the artist-built environment for an intimate look, and to sit at the ironing-board-transformed-desk, opening the envelopes placed there. Inside the envelopes, poems/quotes/images are intended to further examine the connections between the ordinary and sublime objects and gestures presented within the installation, as well as, for the viewers to embody the metaphor of folding and unfolding. The relational poetics examined within this piece hopes to inspire reflection and dialogue on the wisdom currently being revealed within each person.
Unfolding, water, earth, roots, pitcher, glasses, cement, medicine cabinet, ironing boards, desk chair, lunch box, glassine envelopes, maps, silk thread, mustard seeds, lima bean seeds, dictionary pages, projected images, acrylic paint, spray paint, paper, bone folder, 2017
www.nicolesalimbene.com
For more information about the exhibit please see our Exhibition Brochure