Artist Statement
My recent body of work incorporates Feminism, themes of
domesticity, body image, and female experience. Added to
them is the quirky twist of my Italian American background.
In my work liquid soap bottles become angels, clothespins
become musical notes, lasagna becomes wallpaper and a
bikini, and fusilli pasta becomes a dress form.
Traditional Italian roles for women, involving the art of
meal preparation and care of family, clash with the
American way of life in which women are asked to focus on
independence, career, and body image. Torn between old
world values and modern aspirations, women from Italian
American backgrounds find themselves in a stressful
conundrum. They want to care for their families, as well as
pursue their aspirations as freely as men.
The Italian American culture is rich in its zest for life,
as well as its eccentricities. My family life is full of
both. It is also full of humor, strong familial bonds,
cultural pride, nurturing and overnurturing, compulsion,
artful preparation, romantic notions, excess and abundance,
ceremony, religion, domesticity, living the American Dream
and experiencing conflicting female role models. Family is
the priority for Italians, and women, as the caregivers,
are central to it. Role models for women range from The
Madonna on one hand and Sophia Loren on the other. As a
woman you are expected to encompass both.
Consequently in my work, domestic objects such as ironing
boards, clothespins, dishes, and pasta are juxtaposed with
divine images including the Madonna, St. Zita (patron saint
of the household), Gregorian Chants and Communion wafers.
Repetition of the domestic objects is used to emphasize the
mundane as in everyday chores. The repetition on a large
scale shows the compulsiveness that can develop from the
overwhelming quality of domestic maintenance chores. The
repetition also comments on individuality. By altering
common objects or applying divine imagery to them, those
objects are transformed into a more individual, sacred
object. These unlikely combinations naturally create humor,
transform the objects into shrines, and define the
absurdity of the expectations, stereotypes and roles
against which women in my Italian American culture are
measured.
In a culture where food and family life are predominant, it
is appropriate that domestic maintenance, food and family
nurturing would be the subjects of my art. I realized I was
putting the same kind of painstaking preparation into my
artwork as into a meal. An integral part of my labor
intensive work is the step by step preparation needed to
create it.
The use of pasta mimics the ephemerality of domestic
maintenance, such as cooking and cleaning, which take hours
of preparation only to be immediately dirtied or eaten. The
ephemeral pasta also critiques the myth of beauty. The
pasta objects are laboriously created, but will eventually
break down.
My humorous outlook sees something more in the repetitive
task than a futile repetition of endless housework or lost
hope. But there is also the threat of suffocation in these
excessive, familiar, domestic objects. One can easily find
oneself trapped. Maybe keeping a sense of humor is the way
to avoid suffocation.
For me anger is not a productive emotion. It is healthier
to keep one's sense of humor. Often people are willing to
examine tougher issues when they are approached with humor,
just as beauty can seduce the viewer to examine more
closely a repulsive subject. If one can get people to look
and consider, then maybe can society's attitude toward
women be altered.
