on the subversion of opacity at Cuchifritos Gallery + Project Space

on the subversion of opacity at Cuchifritos Gallery + Project Space is part of the Workspace exhibition series and features the work of recent residents of the LES Studio Program, Arianna Carossa and Beatrice Glow.

«In the 1988 essay “Lightness,” Italo Calvino explains that the strength of the literary imagination is in the writer’s ability to wade through the opacity of our literal world by using the language of mythology to subvert the “weight” of ideas. Through site-specific installations, including sculpture and digital prints on silk, on the subversion of opacity, considers the ways in which artists provide an indirect view of reality, representing it as a fictional myth drawn from facts, forms, or histories, but never reflecting them directly.

Arianna Carossa strives to create work that emerges from the environment in which she is called to realize a project, aiming to find situations or moments where the design of an object itself can relate to everything around it. Beatrice Glow’s series of digital prints on silk tells the social history of the spice trade as a bloody continuum of exploitation, extraction, and land dispossession. The artists’ experimentation with personal formalism create new worlds that encourage the viewer to exceed their own assumptions within an exhibition space. Estranged from their original context, the former lives of these objects and narratives become transparent, yielding their political, social and practical nature to an intimacy between the viewer and the visual experience.»

–  words by Alessandro Facente, curator

on the subversion of opacity, Cuchifritos Gallery + Project Space, New York. June 10 – July 10, 2016