Tentative Itineraries

Background

My practice has consisted of mixed-media works, which include site-specific installations, cut-out collages and book-works.
I call all my works Tentative Itineraries.

Material

In my installations I use old, found, mass-produced and personal items.
In the two-dimensional works: acrylics, geographical and geological maps, shredded letters (from Italy).
Some three-dimensional works rotate when hand spun.
The collages are cut out to form intricate labyrinths.

Philosophy

My work focuses on the reclamation of the old and its transformation into the new. I address themes of travel as migration and displacement, and exploit my ambiguous relationship between English and Italian, my first language, as a reference in developing my works.

My working philosophy is informed by the historical and geographical attributes of my culture. The Mediterranean Sea is and has been the basin of confluence and collision of  Northern and Southern Europe, North Africa, the Balkans, the Middle East. My works bring the complexity of these tensions to North America.

Conceptually, my work describes disorientation. I question the stability of taken-for-granted sites of personal identity as home, nation and native language. Thus my works offer a visual equation of the contradictory nature of human desire: the struggle between affirmation and negation, assimilation and marginality, complicity and escape.