Indepth Arts News:
"Alessandra Exposito: Greener Pastures"
2006-08-24 until 2006-10-07
Mixed Greens Gallery
New York, NY,
USA United States of America
Mixed Greens is thrilled to announce their second solo show with Alessandra
Exposito. In this exhibition, Exposito presents large-scale paintings and
an installation of animal skulls. For the past few years, Exposito has created small sculptures using chicken
skulls. While the rooster is a national symbol in Cuba, Exposito
purposefully chose its female counterpart to be the subject of her work. The
adorned skulls comment on the use of large, exotic game as decoration and
use the hen as a vehicle to explore power, gender roles and the body.
In this exhibition, Exposito broadens her vocabulary and constructs a
"trophy wall" of farm animals and beloved pets. She flirts with machismo
stereotypes associated with the "hunter" to create a wall of skulls that
appropriate and exploit trendy accoutrements of femininity. Over a dozen
chicken skulls hang together with skulls of a horse, dogs, cats and mice.
Each skull's tender decoration and meticulous detailing evokes the intimacy
of a fetish object, while their large sculpted horns imply a more grandiose
history. Tiny jewels are used as accents that draw attention to the
marvelous intricacies of the skull with its many hollows, fragile
projections, and lacy contours. The animal's memorial portrait is painted on
the skull along with its fictitious name, habitat or owner.
In the north gallery, pieces of the trophy wall are repeated in Exposito's
ambitious paintings. In each, a life-sized self-portrait floats among
antlers, dead game, jewels and bullet holes on the canvas. Elements of the
feminized hunt appear and surround the figure. Just as the trophy wall
blurs the boundary between feminine and masculine, the entrancing figures
appear to exist in an ambiguous in-between space.
Alessandra Exposito received her MFA from the Mason Gross School of the Arts
in 1998. Since then, group exhibition venues include Ambrosino Gallery,
Miami, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York and Art in
General, New York. Prior museum exhibitions include "Open House, Working
in Brooklyn," at the Brooklyn Museum of Art (2004), "Miniatures" at the
Jersey City Museum (2004), and "El Museo's Biennial" at El Museo del Barrio,
New York (2002). Alessandra was the recipient of a Marie Walsh Sharpe
Studio (2003-2004) and a MacDowell Colony residence (2001). In 2005, she
won the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Foundation Award and the Purchase Award
from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
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