Of Limes and Camouflage Victoria DeBlassie
Of Limes and Camouflage an introduction by Connor Maley Of Limes and Camouflage, Victoria DeBlassie’s, F_AIRFlorence Artist in Residence from January to May 2013, most recent solo exhibition is an in-depth and fragrantly dizzying exploration of the illimitable preponderance of boundaries, demarcations, beginnings and endings that mark and mar a life, a sussing out of the cobwebs and the skeletal remains of the past and the present and all the furiously confusing interstitial areas in between beginnings and endings and pasts and presents and where, amidst all of this, the artist and the viewer fit into this blinding mess hidden behind a maschera of fulgent, wrecked beauty. Don’t be fooled by the seemingly joyous sheen of orange or reds most relatable to sunlight; a haunted intensity lies underneath the surface, like stained glass. As a result of a Fulbright Scholarship award for 20122013 period, she has been afforded an opportunity to immerse herself in the Florentine artistic world, itself a blend of contemporaneous and atavistic influences, which has proven to be a catalytic context in which she could thenceforth build upon a longheld theoretical aspect of her critical research based on the recycling of orange peels, a practice with which she has experimenting since the nascent moments of her career with her focus zeroing in on the manipulation of materials, ideally ones that most people forget about or ignore, endowing post-consumed objects and fruits with a renaissance of their own. Perhaps more than anything else, it’s the ideals and principles behind these substrative notions regarding material transformation and the reimagined re-use of an object well past its shelf-life expiry or relevance date that comprise the generative force behind her artistic drive. An elemental crux to DeBlassies’s theoretical underpinning is the fact that oranges in Italian culture, dating back to the Italian Renaissance, have been historically associated with luxurious wealth, opulence, and classism and with the misguided, unnatural creation of manmade establishments of utopian order designed to somehow mimic the natural disorder of the natural world in order to create a safe hospice where the plutocratic community could get away from the unruly masses and distantly admire the nature they were subsuming. In Renaissance gardens oranges alluded to happy and fruitful events and to prosperity not to mention the immediate bounty of the future of which they were heliocentrically convinced was destined for them, but this was also a fruit-a relic, really, an artifact-to which few at that time had hopes of access, which is as metaphorical of a statement as it is literal. These gardens as loci amoeni excluded the outside world with
schemes that opened the mind to lofty abstract geometry and to the restrictive girds on the breadth of the truly feral and uncontained natural world, and they were reserved only for the elite. The interpretation of the orange as once being an elitist, Medicean fruit reserved exclusively for the wasteful ornamentation of the ruling class that has now evolved into a readily available commodity found in supermarkets for a few meager euros per kilo whose skins and pulp eventually find their way into dumpsters and waste receptacles to be subsequently forgot about as the juicer runs its mouth is key in this exhibition: in fact, the wryly subversive idea of repurposing established systems of value and class and giving the outlandish fortune that once was reserved for so few back to such a vast public is integral to understanding DeBlassie’s work. This gift and its generosity transcend and supplant time. This convergence of past and present are fundamental to Of Limes and Camouflage, which is composed of wall pieces and installation works where the dominating elements are warm colors of the sun, the fruits that most resemble it, and the visible gradations and developments marked indelibly by the passage of time felt and experienced by all manner of objects and organisms with a skin or a surface on which to show it, from overgrown Renaissance gardens to moirémimicking mesh packaging for mass produced oranges to the impossibility of a perfectly translated story where linguistic tropes hope to mirror meaning but cannot despite translator’s best efforts. Material, for DeBlassie, is a type of language that tells a story of change and relationships. DeBlassie collects and afterward processes the perfumed citrus peels using traditional Italian tanning techniques to transform the orange, lime, and lemon peels into a new leather, esteeming the time-honored methods of leather-making and transplanting those methodologies onto a modern art-making form, blending the two. She stitches the tanned peels together in order to make a pliable material with limitless structural and architectural capabilities. She has been applying various crafts techniques to orange peels since she was a teenager with a developing interest in creative reuse of material and textural, formal transformation. At the end of the frequent family brunches occurring on Sunday during her formative years, Victoria assigned herself the role of tidying up; she collected the meals’ leftover fruit peels and explored ways of providing new postprandial meaning to those otherwise useless skins and rinds and husks, in order to extend but also transmogrify the joy and ongoing developmental growth and evolution found during those gatherings. Melancholic, yet social, Victoria liked to weave large, intensive tapestries inspired by these meals of increasing impermanence that haunted as much as they charmed. Saving the peels, renovating the life
of the fruits, and sculpturally translating the presiding power of these experiences allowed for a continuation of the feast, preserving and honoring a private taste of the flavors and smells of a past to which one can never return but is wholly formed by regardless. DeBlassie emphasizes the convivial dimension surrounding the genesis of her practice in an attempt to involve the audience through conversation and interaction with the art-making and the art itself so that the two become indistinguishable or at least dependent on one another, and in Of Limes and Camouflage, the social and participative aspects mark the beginning and the development of her project and blossom in new and fascinating ways, becoming almost a pretext from which to explore the complex dynamics of building meaningful relationships in a foreign country where one’s theretofore easily established and understood identity is disintegrated and disrupted almost immediately after leaving the airport and to tap into the manifold ways in which meaning, significance, and expression emerge-and dissolve—linguistically and imagistically and socially and even gastronomically across cultures, the oh so many successes and failures of trying to assert oneself in a world not your own. How does one be oneself in a world where the normal manners in which one expresses oneself no longer apply? How to validate oneself in a world where one’s validation is, in essence, invalid, and if not quite invalid then at least confounding and implausible? Ontologically, how does one be or essere in such a world? It’s a literal and psychological process of conjugation with oneself as the transitive verb. DeBlassie’s work digs into these quandaries and conundra and is simultaneously cheery and grim about it, humorous and deadly somber. In a language not her own and in which she was continuously grasping for meaning, Victoria overcame the intimidation of being alien among unknown people and sought out the kindness and help of strangers and local merchants and vendors alike, and further edified the interpersonal sociality of her previous work in this project set both in Firenze and Castelfranco di Sotto and pretty much everywhere else in between. As the title suggests, the exhibition is not merely about citruses; utilizing and valorizing all sundry types of ephemera and interrelated curios, it is an investigation into personal mimetism and the subtle politics and gestures that complicate blending into not just a foreign country and one’s surroundings as a whole but becoming a part, parcel, and fabric of the entire sociocultural atmosphere-i.e. becoming someone else within yourself - in which a person finds him- or herself, where language is a filter as well as a means of sharing and an offering and, above all, an investigative device used to deepen our understanding of the fluidity and protean nature of identity. What, then, to make of the whole Of Limes and Camouflage title and its putative obscurity, or of the limes themselves? What’s
needed to address those questions is a understanding of both the history of citrus fruits and a better comprehension of what exactly camouflage or crypsis means especially in these contexts outside of a typical martial rendering. What do citrus fruits and Renaissance gardens and camouflage have to do with each other, especially when convened into one multilayered mostra? What does remembering the fact that aristocrats wanted to preserve in chrysalis form a kind of onlife-support representation of nature mean even if the forms through which they preserved such representations made zero sense nor bore much genuine resemblance to the actual fructive origins from which they indeed literally came and stood out more than they blended in, and how, above all, does this relate to camouflage and committing oneself to becoming part of a new culture through a process of self-blending and -assimilation and -shedding? Can all of these disparate parts, in fact, relate? Yes, it turns out, resoundingly. Limes as a keyword and a key image here isn’t random, nor is it solely reliant upon its relation to the citrus family, the same way that oranges don’t solely refer to oranges as fruit but to a widespread influence of the term and its phenomenal influence over culture and history; during the Renaissance in the predominate Neo-Latin tongue of the time, oranges sometimes referred to as medici and the superfluity of orange imagery and its highly involved presence in the art and interior design of the time period and within the Medici halls and villas is anything but coincidental. There’s an etymological distinction here not just worth mentioning but vital to understand in terms of DeBlassie’s current motivic and thematic interest in blending, assimilating, and abandoning oneself between spaces and limits, not unlike how citrus fruits chart the western spread of civilization. Lime, as a fruit, as a word, derives from the Latin limes, which, like many Latin nouns, possesses plethoric meanings: a path or a balk delimiting fields, a boundary line or a marker; any road or path; a fortified frontier, or a space between spaces between spaces between spaces tuckered somewhere between the spaces of all immeasurable spaces. Limes leads expectedly and naturally into limen, signifying a threshold, a doorstep, a lintel, a commencement, a termination, a beginning, an ending, but more importantly that little easily forgettable space right between where it’s necessary to be both one and the other, to represent both sides, to resemble both. Limen obviously leads to a liminal space, which is about as haute couture an art term in the contemporary arena as you can get, but here it has literal, etymological significance. Being under the threshold, under the initial bough of the pergola, under the beginning of an entrance but nowhere near the end, in between movements and centuries and epochs - Firenze, itself, being the perfect representation of liminality-has profoundly influenced DeBlassie’s work while she’s been in Firenze, not just the seat or the sede of contemporary art but of western
civilization as a whole, the threshold between the then and the now, the antediluvian and the ultra-contemporary. And the Renaissance gardens themselves, confident and assured and meticulously controlled, were little more than tepid and regulated representations of the natural world meant to blend and camouflage naturally with the uncontrolled wild world around them, forcefully documented gardens and erected areas now overrun by time and inattention yet still artificially arisen, forms of their former forms, abstract and theoretical but irrespectively striking all the same with their husks and palimpsests breathing underneath; blending in in this context meant immersing into nature to such an extent that the division between nature and landscaped garden was done away with, but that was, and remains to be, impossible, and those divisions and differences are unearthed by DeBlassie’s meticulous and indicting craft found here in Of Limes and Camouflage. DeBlassie’s work, nestled into the uncomfortable moment of the separation between these two incongruous historical modalities and two momentously divergent but difficult to define aspects of existence—a soaring internment of pastness and history with a shuttling, uncertain fraction of contemporaneity; and a bristling, overbrimming demonstration of nature brushing shoulders with a tamer, more refined and
rarefied artifice at the hands of an aesthete, respectively-in the nucleic center of which she thrives by adopting both history and presentness and nature and artifice, not only attempts to portray the effects of this conscious or unconscious blendingin with nearby surroundings while suspended in abeyance in such a yawning, chasmlike threshold where one is neither home or lost but forever ensconced in the heart of limina but rather she magnifies and projects these differences and highly convolved qualia to enormous degrees, occupying these transitional boundaries and portals, channeling the transitory energy found in them, and rendering these moments into sensorial, experiential installations. Similar to the Renaissance gardens magnificent attempts at mirroring the environment around them in hopes of seeming natural or generating and sprouting naturally from that spurning all-pollinational nature, DeBlassie’s installations, made of limes and orange peels and wooden crates for the shipment and storage of citrus fruits and swept over in parchment paper meant to protect and decorate the oranges into a fragrant world of intimacy and pigment, strive to tap into the struggle through which one goes when attempting to do the same, i.e. to seem natural and native without sacrificing one’s own essence, when in a place that isn’t and can never be one’s own.
Of Limes and Camouflage, exhibition view, F_AIR – Florence Artist In Residence, 2013
Villa Petraia, 8 prepackaged Esselunga orange mesh bags, invisible thread, 2013
Villa Maiano, 8 prepackaged Esselunga orange mesh bags, invisible thread, 2013
Villa I Tatti, 16 prepackaged Esselunga orange mesh bags, invisible thread, 2013
Villa Medicea di Castello, 16 prepackaged Esselunga orange mesh bags, invisible thread, 2013
Villa Papiniano, 8 prepackaged Esselunga orange mesh bags, invisible thread, 2013
Villa Caruso, 8 prepackaged Esselunga orange mesh bags, invisible thread, 2013
Cascade, tanned orange peel, invisible thread, 2013
Cascade, tanned orange peel, invisible thread, 2013 (detail)
Giardino di Boboli, Orange Wrappers 2, tanned and dyed lemon, lime and orange peel, invisible thread, crates, 2013
(detail)
Giardino di Boboli, Orange Wrappers 1, tanned and dyed lemon, lime and orange peel, invisible thread, crates, 2013
(detail)
Parallel Testo, tanned orange peel, invisible thread, paper, glue, fabric, wire, 2013 (detail)
Parallel Testo, tanned orange peel, invisible thread, paper, glue, fabric, wire, 2013
Bio Victoria DeBlassie (1987, Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA) received her BFA from the University of New Mexico in 2009 and MFA from California College of Arts in 2011. She has participated to numerous juried group exhibitions such as Through Feminist Eyes, juried by Judy Chicago and Meinrad Craighead, Masley Art Gallery, Albuquerque, 2008; Italy: Contemporary Art and Culture, North and South Gallery, Oakland, California, 2010; Taste, Root Division, San Francisco, California, 2013. In April 2013 she curates F(light) the exhibition of the students of the course of Intermediate Ceramics, which she taught over the residence at F_AIR; the show took place at Fast, the Fashion School of Florence University of the Arts, and it was subsequently re-installed at the Mostra Mercato dell’Artigianato, Fortezza da Basso, Florence, Italy, 2013. Solo exhibitions includes: Piel, [AC]2 Gallery, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 2009; Collect, Skin, Dry, Stitch, Repeat, Make Hang Gallery, San Francisco, California, 2011-2012. Scholarships, Awards, Residencies: 2013: F_AIR – Florence Artist In Residence at Florence University of the Arts; 2012-2013: Fulbright grant for study and research in Italy; 2012: Artist in Residence at La Muse, Labastide Esparbairenque, France, 20112012: Artist in Residence at Make Hang Gallery, California. Her works appear in several publications, such as Art Practical, SF Gate, Ouroboros (Volume 1), 2011; CCA News; Composite (Arts Magazine) No. 6 Process, 2012. Her research on orange peel tanning processes has been recently published on several Italian magazines specialized on leather processes. victoriadeblassie.com
Of Limes and Camouflage Victoria DeBlassie Curated by Lucia Giardino May 28 - June 14th 2013 F_AIR - Florence Artist in Residence Catalog Text Connor Maley Graphics Alberto Simoncioni - Graphic Office Palazzi Photo credits Silvia Mancini Press Office Palazzi Susanna Bausi, Annapaola Presta Special thanks to Gabriella Ganugi - President of Palazzi and Florence University of The Arts The School of Fine Arts of Florence University of the Arts Nora Takacs FUA Special Event Manager And to all those who made the exhibition possible, in particular to: Badiani, Gelateria Cavini, Lovelife, Veggi, Viola Andrea Duse Masin, Federico Bacci, Viola Andrea Duse Masin, Fulbright Program in Italy, Maria Grazia Quieti, Sasha Dvorzova, Cecilia Niccoli Vallesi, and all the Fulbright community in Florence, Melanie Goldstein, Julia Miglets, Kelli Robeson Wood, Lindsay Paiva, Carolyn Zimmerman, Kellie Riggs, Dott. Domenico Castiello and the Polo Tecnologico Conciario of Castefranco di Sotto, Eleonora Cai and Cristina Cavallini, Carlo Junior Desgro, Maurizio Salvadori, Valerio Talarico, Matteo, Simone, The Univesita IUAV di Venezia and Cornelia Lauf, my family, Paul and Kathleen DeBlassie (my parents), Maria DeBlassie, Christine Hwang, Paul DeBlassie IV, Nick Jonhnson, Nick Page, Katherine Page, and to the love of my life Connor DeMaley Further partners and supporters British Institute, Firenze Pietro Gaglianò Museo Nazionale Alinari della Fotografia, Firenze Throng Nguyen Sebastien Sanchez de Santamaria, Residency Unlimited, New York F_AIR - Florence Artist In Residence via San Gallo 45/r 50129 Firenze +39 055 0332950 fair@fua.it fair.palazziflorence.com
F_AIR Via San Gallo 45/r, 50129 Florence, Italy Ph: +39 055 0332950 fair@fua.it