MMXX: The Year of Change - SACI 2020 MFA Exhibition Catalog

MMXX The Year Of Change

SACI MFA Exhibition 2020

MMXX: The Year of Change SACI 2020 MFA Exhibition Catalog

Neha Ganesh Bharadwaj Averi Biswas Tatjana Lightbourn Kelli M. Perletti Iris Richardson Lucia Simental Wayne Stoner

April 2020

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Foreword Steven Brittan, SACI President

The SACI MFA students of 2020 graduated during what will be looked back on as a historic year.

In the past two years, faced with challenges and alternate learning methods, our artists and designers demonstrated remarkable adaptability and resilience while completing their two-year MFA programs at SACI. Although their work is diverse, there is a noticeable commonality of spirit evidenced through a deep evaluation and critique of society, in step with this pivotal period of introspection and unpredictability.

Our artists and designers explored the pursuit of peace, compassion, equality, morality, and fairness

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through personal and heartfelt life experiences. They, like many artists and designers around the world, have bravely journeyed through the eye of the storm in a steadfast and determined manner, pursuing and developing their artistic goals to the limit.

This catalog can be viewed as a crucial document that takes stock of our human condition through the eyes of our graduates. It captures a moment in time when the world stopped and when the responsibility and role of the artist was brought into heightened visual and social focus and efficacy. It will be a moment we will never forget.

Introductions Kirsten Stromberg, MFA in Studio Art Program Director

When the graduate students from the SACI MFA programs decided on the exhibition title ‘The Year of Change,’ little did they know that this choice would be a prophecy to COVID-19, one of the greatest changes in recent world history.

This group experienced the deeply personal and physical meanings of change as Italy went into lockdown in the middle of their last semester, with only seven more weeks to go until their graduation and a short five weeks until their planned final Group Exhibition at Frittelli Arte Contemporanea Gallery in Florence. The exhibition was not possible, and in the spirit of change, their hard work, thoughtfulness, and research were moved into another space: this catalog. This space may be less three-dimensional, but in its current expanded format, it is, in some ways, more public in its outreach, extensive in its picture of each student’s research, and appropriately mobile for each to take with them on their travels throughout the world.

In embracing change as a collective aspect of their artistic research, Averi Biswas, Iris Richardson, Lucia Simental, Tatjana Lightbourn, and Wayne Stoner are five graduates who, each in their own way, reflect on the connections of their work and the greater reverberations and social significance in the world.

Averi has dedicated her artistic practice to a search for peace and the spiritual in art through creating quiet works for interior reflection with light, color, and geometry.

Iris’s work questions materialism and its value systems, focusing on the skin as a metaphor and the indexical nature of representation in photography and its extended practices.

Regardless of the weather, The moon shines the same; It is the drifting clouds That make it seem different On different nights.

- An Unknown Priest in The Narrow Road To The Deep North and Other Travel Sketches, by Matsuo Basho

Lucia is deeply committed to creating positive spaces for women, trailblazing a new connection to feminism and the earth with her dedication to clay and its potential to heal.

Tatjana’s work celebrates individual agency and collective narrative in reframing the black body in space with works that incorporate found text/sound, performativity, and participation.

And Wayne’s paintings honor the gentle shifts of ephemeral moments, revealing to us the transitory nature of existence and how we perceive daily truths.

A hearty congratulations to these five emerging artists for all they have achieved at SACI in these past two years and for inviting all of us to reflect on This Year of Change.

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Romeo Di Loreto and Jacopo Santini, MFA in Photography Program Co-Directors

Kelli Perletti’s work is embodied by coherence. Her project is – as it seems – just one expression of a choice that is, first and foremost, ethically motivated.

The background and raison d’être of her photographic endeavour is primarily her long-standing involvement in the fate of Q’eqchi people in Guatemala and her deep, personal connection with these communities. For years, Kelli worked as an educator for NGOs (Non-Governmental Organizations) active in the area.

Recently, she created her own NGO with the purpose of bringing assistance in the field of primary education.

Photography is a branch – and not the last – of a comprehensive attitude from which it has inherited its content, direction, and uncompromising ethical code.

As a result of this standpoint, Kelli refuses to use photography in a purely documentary way, from behind the shield of an impossible objectivity. She is also an activist, and thus deeply concerned with the relations between the purpose of her project, her profound respect for her subjects’ right to choose, and the role played by aesthetics.

Kelli is conscious of the countless ethical dilemmas faced by photographers, and she has

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made one of these unanswered questions the core of her body of work: How to be a witness and, at the same time, bring aid and further the cause of the Q’eqchi people – without losing, on the one hand, the transparency of her glance and, on the other, the necessity of a representation that doesn’t betray?

Her solution has been to merge subject matter and technical process to create a whole in which technical choices and imagery are inseparable. Her decision to use very simple chemistry (Caffenol), workable in uncomfortable locations, and develop her negatives on site instead of waiting to return to Florence – which would somehow cause the loss of both her primary impulse and the physical relation between the environment and its representation – along with her decision to involve the villagers and their families, particularly the youngest, in the developing phase, are all manifestations of her uncompromising will to be close, physically and emotionally, to her friends and subjects. This also indicates her desire to use photography for its peculiar indexical nature, which shares the strengths of evidence in its unavoidable, iconic uniqueness of an ethical and aesthetic point of view.

Camilla Torna, MFA in Communication Design Program Director

Designers are moving away from communicating tangible products, focusing instead on intangible services and processes.

The following three pillars of the history of design convey how this new role of communication designers in society developed over time.

• 1920s, the social goal of design: Otto and Marie Neurath (an economist and a social scientist) were creative revolutionaries who shared the utopian vision that a simplified visual language would change the world into a better place. Their Isotype Institute, founded in Vienna, had the slogan “Words divide, pictures unite.”

• 1960s, the political goal of design: in the “First things first” manifesto published in 1964, more than 400 graphic designers criticized the role they were confined to, asking to be involved in more socially and environmentally responsible processes, instead of working with advertising techniques with the sole purpose of driving the consumption of more goods.

• Now, the information goal of design: past the peak of “cool” infographics, Giorgia Lupi, an Italian information designer at Pentagram, calls for a new Data Humanism that will question

the impersonality of a merely technical approach to data.

With all this background in mind, Neha Ganesh Bharadwaj has used her role as a designer to invest­ igate the issue of burnout and create a tool for self-reflection.

The only way to communicate is to understand what it is like not to understand.

It is at that moment that you can make something understandable.

- Richard Saul Wurman

Burnout is a recent definition related to working life, and it is different from stress, unlike what many people think; actually, stress over prolonged periods of time can turn into burnout. In 2019, WHO (World Health Organization) defined it as “feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion; increased mental distance from one’s job, or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one’s job; and reduced professional efficacy.”

With the creation of a set of friendly visual elements and a website where the viewer can start reflecting upon personal burnout, Neha has brought the general public a step closer to comprehending this topic. Her social approach to improving a vital awareness of our increasingly frantic daily schedules has evolved into a collaborative platform where more information is shared, making the world a better place where – to quote Lupi – numbers are connected “to what they really stand for: knowledge, behaviors, people.”

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Enjoy this artwork in Augmented reality!

2. View the image through your smartphone

1. Install the Artivive app

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Neha Ganesh Bharadwaj MFA in Communication Design

How are you?

Really “How are you?

I’m okay..

No, really?

Well..its been hard at work..”

On May 28th of 2019, WHO officially included burnout as an occupational phenomenon, not just a medical condition. This meant that now, one could be diagnosed with burnout and seek treatment for it. While mental disorders are usually ‘taboo’ and avoided, burnout, on the other hand, is normalized to an extent where the chronic state of exhaustion is celebrated as a sign of success. It is important to understand that while stress is a normal emotional response, burnout is not.

Neha Ganesh Bharadwaj draws on her lifelong love of the art of storytelling and visual communication, and aims to create work that stirs a conversation. After completing her B.Des, she worked at a multidisciplinary design studio in Mumbai, after which she began her MFA in Communication Design in Italy. Using various skillsets gained along the way, she now aims to bridge the fields of illustration, storytelling, and information design through her work, and strongly believes in the magic of visuals and their potential to change the world.

This project aims to communicate the true meaning and journey of burnout in the human body through the principles of data visualization and infographics, and finally aims to empower users with the right tools to help themselves.

Left: Burnout: The New Epidemic Above: HW R U really* logo of the web experience

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Neha Ganesh Bharadwaj Left: A visualization of the three stages of burnout in the human body Above: The website https://hwru-really.webflow.io/

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hwru_really

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FOLLOWERS

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FOLLOW Have you checked in with yourself today? https://hwru-really.webflow.io/

Neha Ganesh Bharadwaj Above: HW R U Really* on social media (Instagram) Right Top: Burnout visualization sheet ‘How do you spend your 24 hours?’

Right Bottom: Burnout visualization sheet ‘A month of emotions at work’

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Critical Text: Neha Ganesh Bharadwaj Michael Reali, Head of Design at Lotrek and SACI MFA in Communication Design Instructor

Neha Bharadwaj’s work aims at familiarizing people with the occupational phenomenon of burnout, recently included by the WHO in their International Classification of Diseases.

project aims at presenting the phenomenon of burnout in a way that is both clear and relatable, allowing people to recognize this abstract concept within their own lives and experiences.

While mental disorders are usually ‘taboo’ and avoided, burnout, on the other hand, is normalized to the extent where this chronic state of exhaustion is celebrated as a sign of success.

Inspired by Giorgia Lupi’s definition of Data Humanism, this work uses information design as a way to simplify the representation and understanding of emotional and personal data. It focuses on bridging the gap between impersonal numbers and the personal stories behind those numbers.

The project challenges this idea by arguing that while stress is a normal, and sometimes useful, emotional response, burnout is not and should not be accepted as a desirable outcome of our working lives.

The cornerstone of this project is an interactive website that on one hand offers information on symptoms and definitions and, on the other, provides tools for journaling and self-reflection to set off on a personal healing path.

Neha’s work spans across multiple disciplines and approaches, going from data collection to information design, from interactive testing and prototyping to branding, illustration, and book design.

Following in the tradition of design thinking—problem solving through the use of creativity—this

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How do we represent feelings of stress and anxiety? How do we portray the human body? What is the shape of stress? And its color?

Neha explores these questions and more through data gathering, testing, and prototyping. Her work is all about establishing connections and identifying patterns that will later be condensed down into images, text, and symbols. These in turn will be reviewed and revised to take into consideration her audience’s feedback.

This will then shape the next iteration of her design in a virtuous and continuous loop of feedback and improvement. Putting people at the center of the design process empowers them and ensures that design decisions are always grounded in reality.

Symbols for Burnout: The New Epidemic

One of the ways in which this project successfully connects people’s experience online and offline is by offering a set of visualization tools visitors of the website can download.

In this unprecedented time of selfdistancing and working from home, we are experiencing a somewhat imposed digital (re)naissance which causes everyone’s work/life balance to become even more fragile.

This valuable companion helps people document their daily activities and feelings. Handcrafting a visual representation of their work/life balance turns their emotions into something tangible that can be communicated and acted upon.

While technology has brought us closer and in many ways made our lives easier, it can also be the source of additional stress and anxiety. Now more than ever mental health and self-observation are key, and Neha’s work is a step in the right direction.

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Interview: Neha Ganesh Bharadwaj Mila Pinigin, MA in Art History (SACI ‘20)

What is the importance and relevance of your most current body of work in today’s art world?

Design today plays an important role in the world’s socio-political movements, and this is a space that has piqued my interest and is now growing. It proves to be a vital tool for envisioning and shaping our future. Through my work, I have always tried to use design as a tool to inform and educate, so when it came to defining my thesis for the MFA in Communication Design program, I was instantly drawn towards working in the field of healthcare and using my personal experience and consequent reflection about the need for intervention, as a graphic designer, in a widespread health issue: burnout.

WHO officially included burnout as an occupational phenomenon, not just a medical condition, on May 28th, 2019. This meant that now one could be diagnosed with burnout and seek treatment for it.

While mental disorders are usually ‘taboo’ and avoided, burnout, on the other hand, is normalized to an extent where the chronic state of exhaustion is celebrated as a sign of success. It is important to understand that while stress is a normal emotional response, burnout is not.

The objective of my project was to relay the required and important

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information about burnout in a medium and form that could be easily understood and absorbed by the group that is at the highest risk of being in a state of burnout. ‘hw r u - really*’ is a web experience that uses the principles of infographics and data visualization to inform and empower the user with the right information and tools on the effects of burnout on the human body.

How do you approach data and information as the source for your designs? What tools of communication do you feel are most relevant to your work today and in the future?

We live in a world where 350 million photos are uploaded on Facebook every day. With data being built so quickly and with the advent of technology, we now not only have access to this data, but have access to it at our fingertips. The unprocessable amount of information gives information designers, along with more traditional information practitioners like journalists, the responsibility to make sense of complexity.

This data overload excited me and has now become one of the fields of communication I often work within or use in my work.

With information and (visual) literacy growing day by day, there is a higher need for the right kind of information. With a large part of today’s population relying on receiving information from social media, we have to now be even more careful to create work that is easily understood and accurate.

While practices of infographics and data visualization have existed for centuries, the practice of data has always been used to show objective results and facts.

Coined by my favorite information designer Giorgia Lupi, ‘data humanism’ goes beyond numbers; “it is the ability to associate data with people who generate them, with their behaviors and habits: data considered as a narrative element.” I believe that interaction and personalization of data is the future of information and communication design.

How has living and studying in Florence influenced your work?

They say “knowing your history can give you the tools to shape your future.” Coming from India, a country with a rich culture, I was keen to understand the need and process of communicating culture to the outside world. Being in Florence, I had the opportunity to be right in the heart of it, and meeting other designers has helped me widen and deepen

my idea of design – from what it currently is to what it can be.

Being at SACI and having the opportunity to work closely with Camilla Torna and all the other wonderful professors and mentors I have met on this journey has helped me find my own voice as a designer and, in turn, give my work a voice as well.

What dialogue does your work have with current political, social, and cultural factors?

Through my work, I wish to start a conversation. As a graphic designer, I believe my role in this heavily visual world is to relay and empower the user with the right information, hence helping them make decisions and habits that, in turn, can create revolutions and change the world. While we cannot expect to move mountains, we sure can create ripples that lead to waves, and this is my role through my professional practice.

By pulling focus to topics like mental health and healthcare or my other projects that deal with feminine health and sustainability, I believe I can help create conversations that lead to stirs in the larger picture of the world.

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Averi Biswas MFA in Studio Art

Striving for peace is a human condition, in both personal and global spheres. Through her practice, Averi wishes to convey a feeling of stillness, calm, comfort, satisfaction, and peace — a sense of belonging, a feeling of home, a blue jungle that is lit from within and radiates light to the outer world. Each thrown ceramic piece alludes to a species of flora, but at the same time it is evident that each is made by human hands.

This is a reflection of her inner world — an escape from reality, a retreat, a place to rest.

Averi was born in 1995 in India.

Originally a painter, she is now extending her boundaries to include three-dimensional mediums, specifically ceramics.

She always wished she could invite people into her paintings, and now she has found a way to do so through ceramics and the use of light and darkness. Averi majored in painting at Jamia Millia Islamia in Delhi, India, and graduated in 2018. She received her MFA in Studio Art from SACI in Florence, Italy.

When visitors enter this blue, calming space, they are completely immersed in her inner world, surrounded by blue plants, blue paint under their feet, and blue fabric above their heads.

The practice of pottery — to center, pull, and twist to create objects out of lumps of mud that slips under one’s fingers – brings peace. Pottery centers the soul.

This installation of ceramic lamps is the result of Averi’s practice of centering.

May our love for art and artmaking bring us all to our quiet place.

Left: a quiet place, terracotta with blue slip, led illumination, Maidoff Gallery, 20/02/2020 Above: Detail from installation, a quiet place, terracotta with blue slip, led illumination

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Averi Biswas a quiet place, terracotta with blue slip, fabric, led illumination, diameter of tent 396x305 cm, Maidoff Gallery, 20/02/2020

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Averi Biswas Above: Untitled, tea, cabbage juice on paper, 42x29.5 cm, 2020 Right: Untitled, fabric dyed in cabbage juice, thread on paper, 42x29.5 cm, 2020

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Searching for a Center: Averi Biswas Lisa Nocentini, SACI 3D Area Head and Ceramics Instructor

Artists are always searching. Averi Biswas’s work has a lot to do with searching for a center; hers has been a journey of understanding and trying to reach and then express, for the benefit of others, a state of centered self-awareness, consciousness, and inner peace.

Averi states, “I had always visualized or imagined my inner world as a circle and nothing else.” It seems very appropriate then that for her first installation, exhibited at the Maidoff Gallery in Florence in February 2020, and adeptly titled a quiet place, she creates a circle made of blue circles (beautifully harmonious, sometimes composite, ceramic lamp-pots), covered by a blue circle (a fabric tent that she refers to as a Yurt, a circular tent used by nomadic people of central Asia).

Averi invites the viewer to walk alone into what she defines as her ‘jungle,’ in the semi-darkness, just some white and blue light peeking through the openings of her lamp-pots. She is revealing a very intimate secret: this enclosed circular space is the physical manifestation of her ‘inner world.’

Circles are very familiar to potters: working on the wheel with clay implies getting very friendly and collaborative with circular motion, trying to capture a center that is somewhat elusive. Pottery also has a lot to

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do with empty space: pots are physical objects that surround (at times more tightly and at times more loosely) an internal empty space. From a Buddhist point of view (a philosophy that Averi is instinctively connected to) nothing can come into existence unless you have emptiness. Emptiness is the template out of which phenomena appear and into which they disappear.

For a quiet place, Averi created 108 wheel-thrown lamp-pots that range from 20 to 50 cm in height.

To make these, Averi toiled away on the potter’s wheel for hours, days, weeks on end. All 108 lamppots are grouped in families, each family is composed of 6 pots, for a total of 18 families. Each family has a different form. The form of each family is developed from the form of the previous family, thus creating a linear genealogy that speaks of intimate and affectionate connections.

Moreover, when placed in the circular installation, each lamppot, through openings created by striking linear cuts, shines its own inner light onto the pots that are around it, thus modifying the other pots’ shape and appearance. Averi also cleverly states that “the blue light painted the viewers with blue and made them part of my art as long as they stayed inside,” again an example of her intuitive need to create symbolic relationships.

Averi’s time of toil, exercise, and growth in the continuous improvement of her skill with each new member of her pot families constitutes a significant and symbolic artistic statement just in its own right. Lenghty and unseen by most, almost a performance, it connects her with and speaks of the hard work, patience, and unconscious creativity of generations of female potters who, since Neolithic times, have helped human civilization to develop, both materially and spiritually.

Averi compares her often solitary hours on the wheel to a meditative practice where she is continuously making instinctive decisions about subtle changes of line and form. As in Yantras, symbolic and spiritual drawings of Tantric art (an art that Averi is very attracted to), created by combining the elementary geometric shapes, Averi’s instinctive decisions are, nevertheless, structured and framed into a mathematical and somewhat geometric structure of the numbers of pots and families to be created.

In her second, untitled series of works, produced during the lockdown and the physical isolation caused by the coronavirus epidemic, Averi discovers a new path in her search for a center of self-awareness and peace. Lacking any possibility of

working with clay, Averi returns to her original medium, painting.

Her work, though, takes a totally different and unexpected turn. In her words: “these paintings are unlike anything I have painted before, completely abstract and spontaneous….no logic, no planning, based on how I felt at the moment of their composition.”

Using almost exclusively natural pigments (coffee, tea, turmeric, strawberries, various vegetables including cabbage, oranges, etc.) and using the actual vegetables and fruits to print with, she creates a series of very loose, deeply intimate visual statements.

It is as though the hard material of the ceramics were melting and becoming fluid, flowing on paper, creating beautiful abstracted shapes, almost Rorschach inkblots, that allude, nevertheless, to a circle and to an inner space.

At times the circles lose their symmetry and float freely onto the empty paper like clouds.

At times they are outlined and enhanced by delicate pencil lines that define and shape the watery colored areas so as to not let the color escape. At times a delicate thread is sewn into the paper, tying together areas, creating knots and patterns, retracing lost relationships. The needle is left sometimes as the physical representation of this ethereal process.

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These new paintings, in Averi’s words, are strongly influenced by the 17th-century Tantric paintings from Rajasthan and by Tantric art in general. These original Tantric images are stunningly minimal and metaphorically contemporary looking. They are, as all Tantric paintings, the outcome of ritualistic processes and spiritual practices and are definitely not a representation of the painter’s ego.

Averi’s creative process can certainly be compared to such a spiritual practice; she aspires, though, to a higher level of responsibility: “an atmosphere of peace must first be created within ourselves, then gradually expanded to include our families, our communities, and ultimately the whole planet.”

Below: Detail from installation, a quiet place, terracotta with blue slip, led illumination

Interview: Averi Biswas Polina Nazarova, MA in Art History (SACI ‘20)

What is the importance and relevance of your most current body of work in today’s art world?

I think that everyone is controlling their life consciously or subconsciously. If people think that when they have more money they will be happier, they behave in a certain way. I believe in subconscious happiness and, no

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matter what, I will be the happiest person if I can practice art. I want people to step away from the real world when they experience my artwork; being in the dark gives you an opportunity to be in touch with yourself. Art is about finding peace, and it is for everyone.

Experiencing artwork is making it more personal, and my art speaks

for itself. I want my artwork to help distract people from the material reality of this world and provide them with the opportunity to discover an inner self.

What materials do you use and what is their role in your process?

I come from a background focused on painting, and I was introduced to ceramics here at SACI. In India, ceramics is poorly regarded as an art form; however, I found it to be a peaceful and creative process. This exhibition was my first installation, and it was interesting to involve other aspects such as space and light.​​A series of paintings would not have produced the same effect as the installation. I made a total of 108 individual lamps to fill the space, though only 102 made it into the exhibition. I have 6 lamps of each kind, which made it easier to keep the installation in order and make all the necessary calculations.

How has studying and living in Florence influenced your work?

Initially when I moved here, it seemed like everything had a strong impact. To me, Italy is the center of Christianity, and it is personal for me, as Christianity is not that common at home. In one year, living here became more about learning about myself and

experiencing the process of selfexploration. I believe that deep down we are all similar and it is crucial to understand and listen to yourself. I had lots of support from supervisors in this regard. Going to the Venice Biennale inspired and affected me deeply. Europe gave me so much more exposure to contemporary art. In terms of inspiration, the British pavilion at the Biennale was impactful in that it only allowed five people in at a time, I really liked the intimacy it created and decided to do the same for my show to help to create a similar mood.

What dialogue does your work have with current political, social, and cultural factors?

Because I think my artwork is for everyone, it relates to everything. Indirectly, it influences each aspect. Culturally – I find discrimination is a huge issue, and I wish people could understand each other more, as deep down inside we are all the same. Socially – my art brings people closer by allowing them to understand themselves better. I believe my art indirectly influences all of the mentioned factors, but my art speaks for itself and I do not want to generalize. My goal was to make this show individual for everyone by encouraging people to discover their inner selves whilst experiencing it.

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Tatjana Lightbourn MFA in Studio Art

Tatjana Lightbourn is an American artist who uses multimedia and performance installations to explore dimensions of perception.

She confronts the way the black body is seen in the world through seeking and questioning a place for her own body. Working with emotions associated with race, identity, mental health, and gender, she places an emphasis on the transformation of tangible realities in order to eradicate and evade didactic frameworks.

Blending and bending various vernaculars from Afro-Descendent people, a carefully extracted language emerges, which through text, multimedia installation, and performative actions poetically transforms the black body and its relationship to the world.

In the past two years while studying at the Studio Arts College International, Tatjana has expanded her research focusing on the vantage of the black body through these multiple lenses and brings both awareness and responsibility to the viewer and the body being viewed.

Born in South Florida in 1992, Tatjana Lightbourn uses conceptual narratives designed to interpret humanity upon encounter and evoke an individual visceral experience. She received a Bachelor of Science in Fine Arts from Florida A&M University, and worked with the Black Archives Museum and Museum of Florida History to preserve histories of African-American people in the South. Her recent work with Black History Month Florence and Stand Up For Africa Artist Residency have connected her research and passions in Florence, Italy.

Left: Living For The City, white chalk on latex painted wood, 55x10x75 cm, 2020 Above: Artist with Jill Scott’s Brotha Installation, 2020, Maidoff Gallery

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Tatjana Lightbourn Above: B.R.U.H. Installation, 2020, Maidoff Gallery, Includes Living For The City, Jill Scott’s Brotha & Sound Boards Right: Jill Scott’s Brotha and Living For The City, both black latex paint installed on wall, 2020

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Tatjana Lightbourn Above: Hypothetically Absent (a. and b.), graphite, 25x35 cm each, 2019 Right: learning LETTERS, chalk on wood panel, 2019

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The Rheostat of Blackness: Tatjana Lightbourn Justin Randolph Thompson, Co-Founder and Director of Black History Month Florence, SACI Post-Bac in Studio Art Program Director There is a way in which the departure from all that’s familiar pushes us to seek familiarity; the distancing from or actively engaging in discomfort leads us to look for comfort. Displacement and migration take on a multitude of forms, and woven throughout are meditations on privilege, agency, and the attitudes and tendencies of community building. The movement “abroad” for Black Americans has consistently brought with it a reflection upon the histories of so many precedents and the legacies that have been forged with a particular focus that emerges in relation to Black radical thought in an oftromanticized and aspirationally imagined space “free” from the limitations of US history, institutions, and social constructs. If Black radical thought has always been transnational in its manifestations, visions, and aspirations, perhaps it is a capacity to understand that the perceptions and prescriptions attached to Black thought are stifled by nationalistic illusions of exceptionalism. This layered reflection on place, acuity, history, and thought are crucial to an in-depth reflection on the work and outlook of artist Tatjana Lightbourn.

I have written in the past about the ways in which “Being Present,” may be viewed as a baseline, minimal and potentially passive aspect of simple existence. Over the past couple of years Lightbourn has engaged in self-refection and a formal engagement through a

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fragmented language that leaves space for the viewer to fill in the blanks, to translate, to shift the words in order to generate new meanings, to place themselves into the narrative or to see themselves left out. “Being Present,” in this context, is about navigating strategies to make our whole self present in a context that tends to flatten out being, a grappling with the proprieties of something as elusively fluid, yet capable of and perhaps stubbornly prone to stag­ nancy, as Blackness. Intriguing­ ly, a desire towards addressing humanity, painted here purposely with the broadest brush possible, has led Lightbourn to engage the inescapabilty of the socio-political/ art-historical framings of Blackness cast upon artists who identify as such. The meditation in her work is driven simultaneously by an interest in combatting the flatness of what is projected into the darkness of being Black (outlining the simplemindedness and lack of self recognition in placing this frame on work regardless of content) and, parallel to this, reflecting upon a sense of untranscendabilty by elaborating Blackness in its simple, nearly didactic, and complex, uberobtuse states as the central and explicit content of the works.

In a quest to think beyond the wellcharted and long-trodden paths of US-centered meditations on Blackness, somehow, in the search for unifying devices situated within global perspectives, these views

frequently become themselves precisely those which point to a US-rooted perspective. Lightbourn’s work on Blackness, on brotherhood, on the written versus the spoken word, and on the archive, first and foremost, provides the layered complexities of open-ended questions that seem posited for the viewer to resolve. She alludes potentially to the fact that the questions will be answered differently based on our capacity towards precise positionality, towards our aptitude for altruism, towards our ability to admit the contradictions and congruencies between selfreflection and societally crafted pre-concepts, towards the acceptance of each of our capabilities towards knowledge production. A rheostat is an instrument used to control electrical currents through applied resistance. There is a way in which the shifting tensions, clarities, darkness, and humor in Lightbourn’s work engage in forms of resistance that slow or speed up the currents of meaning that they lay out. The resistance itself is what produces the form while resistance, as such, is not a visible component of the forms themselves, leaving much behind the curtain, behind the scenes, out of view, vanished and purposely unlit. These driving and prodding “WHYs” are what sets the tone and tenor of the work while not overly determining the formally rendered wavelengths produced nor their ability to shape individual understandings of self, context, or relationality.

In a moment where intersectional reflections are so fundamental to the pressing social dimensions and restrictions that are crafted through xenophobic, ahistorical, and amnesiac formulations of “the other,” a critical elaboration of what it means to create and have agency in regards to a cultural context largely defined by the outside is crucial. Over the past two years of research and work the artist has elaborated upon the ways in which a direct and explicit narrative can be ruptured into complexity through a simple shifting of the parameters, by a meditation on the position and gaze of the viewer as carrier of meaning. Lightbourn’s orchestra is made up of literary references situated throughout history, artists grappling with the contemporary moment, pop cultural elements that are seemingly timeless, and individuals of various walks all contributing the unresolved questioning of identifying and being identified, collectivity and the individual, the global and the local, and what is deemed intimate and what we refer to as public. These dynamics, overall unresolved and unsettled, transverse works whose formal clarity is underpinned with a conceptual blur, whose roots in Blackness, in femaleness, in Americaness is merely part of the conversation. The remaining notes, words, and phrases are in the spaces between, those left vacant, in what’s not being said, in what has been said so many times, in what needs to be said.

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Interview: Tatjana Lightbourn Mila Pinigin, MA in Art History (SACI ‘20)

What is the importance and relevance of your most current body of work in today’s art world?

It is a culmination of reflections on personal and collective identity that seeks to expand the vantage points, frameworks, and preconceptions in viewing people of African descent. It is a result of my research that follows topics of gender, identity, and the deconstruction of colonized thought.

How do you approach your research?

I go down these rabbit holes, from one to another. I will read a book, listen to an audio book, watch a video, and listen to an interview.

I’m still using a lot of these references and that way of reading and writing to put my thoughts together. My work is based upon experience and working with people, so I started to volunteer in my spare time with Black History Month Florence so that I can get an understanding of what I want.

A pivotal part of my research is being able to have conversations and experience what other black people in the world are doing.

What materials do you use and what is their role in your process?

My use of performance and installation has led me to explore multimedia dimensions of video, sound, and the physical presence as a way to enhance the language

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surrounding the vision of the black body. The use of African-American history and literature has helped to mold the various approaches I have taken in exploring the conversation of the black body in relation to my current context of Italy and the world in a more general form.

Many of my choice materials are things I can immediately place my hands on: a wall, a rock, myself, etc. It is a result of being a young emerging artist with very little working funds, as well as my connection with what I myself have readily accessible. Art is all around us and in us; we must just learn to see it that way.

As a multimedia artist, where do you start? Is it different every time? Do you start with a material in mind that you want to work with or do you start with a concept and you try to match it to the media you feel will best speak to that?

Definitely the concept comes before the material. Maybe my concepts choose their material because I have materials sitting around in the space. Usually, I can’t really afford to get what I want to get so I ended up finding another way, which is a main reason for why I use mixed media, but also because I really need to do multiple dimensions of things because it creates feeling. We have multiple senses, so just staring at one thing wasn’t enough for me.

I wanted to give you more, to give

you something to hear, something to feel, a whole experience.

Did you experience any one particular moment of clarity during your time in Italy?

Black History Month Florence was the moment. I became a part of BHMF spring semester of my first year, and it really gave me an opportunity to get outside of this space and this institution. Being able to get out and really be part of the research that I’m here for with BHMF helped me know that I could push forward and make this opportunity of being in Italy much stronger for me. Italy is a beautiful place, and there are amazing people to meet and amazing conversations to be had, but you really need to not be stuck in a bubble, and I was stuck in a bubble. I became more comfortable getting out and adventuring after working with BHMF, and now I know a lot of people and I have a lot of friends.

You said that “Light, in its blackness and whiteness, is filtered by how and why it is being seen and also who is gazing upon it.” Would you unpack the who and the why in this statement?

Light is equivalent to black and white. That’s it, in its presence and in its absence. I think that’s how we look at it. The perception of light as black and white as a color is the perception of light just

being a color. When we look at the world and we look at people in the world, we don’t think of them as being these perceptions of light, these perceptions of energy. We’re looking at them as if they’re colors, and they’re not. I’m using a general “we” because that’s how it’s often seen because of the history of the world. There have been some really painful things for everyone, and I think it’s important for us to always educate ourselves on those things because that’s how we change. We educate ourselves and move differently so that we can have a world that’s better for the people living in it, and that’s in various and all dimensions.

What dialogue does your work have with current political, social, and cultural factors?

My search for a placement of my black body in the world can be summed up as the way I see myself in relation to the world.

This, however, does not override the constrictions that society has formed in relation to the way the black body is perceived. With the extent of my research, it is shown that the conversation continuously overlaps. Whether it be through disciplines, age, or location, the implications emphasized about blackness deserve acknowledgment and awareness. We should know how we see the black body and we should know how the black body wants to be seen.

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Kelli M. Perletti MFA in Photography

Sweet River; True Peace focuses on the Maya Q’eqchi’ of Alta Verapaz and Rio Dulce, Guatemala—an indigenous population that, despite facing a history of conquest, religiousbased oppression, genocide, and impoverishment, maintains a strong cultural identity. In a changing world encouraging everyone to assimilate, Sweet River; True Peace emphasizes the importance of maintaining autonomy and cultural identity.

Photographing primarily analogically, the film has been developed on site using Caffenol-C (coffee/vitamin-C) developer. Due to humidity, drying the film can last for days, further exposing the negatives to the dust, water, and physical touch of the people.

These additional traces and interactions lend the imagery a strong physicality and closeness to the world to which these images belong.

Kelli M. Perletti is a processedbased photographer working with analogue, alternative, and unconventional processes. Her work relies on a fusion of analogue and digital methods to create cohesive bodies of work. Before pursuing her MFA in Photography, Kelli lived, volunteered, and worked in Central America. She continues to stay actively involved with the indigenous communities of Guatemala as the Vice President and Secretary of Next Step Equal Education, a non-profit organization. https://cargocollective.com/ kellimperlettiphotography k.m.perletti

Left: Enfocada, platinum palladium print, A4, January, 2020 Right: Te Esperé, platinum palladium print, A4, January, 2020

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Kelli M. Perletti Above: Desconocida, platinum palladium print, A4, January, 2020 Right: Voy a Ser, tape image transfer, A4, February, 2020

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Kelli M. Perletti Above: De Rodillas, tape image transfer, A4, February, 2020 Right: Arbol De Victoria, tape image transfer, A4, February, 2020

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Critical Text: Kelli M. Perletti Alessandra Capodacqua, Photographer and Curator

all of these experiences have imbued her life and her artwork, to close the circle. I could go on in defining the variety of outcomes Kelli’s personality, sensibility, and photographic production compose in a virtual mind map in which the connections sometimes take an unexpected route towards unexplored and unforeseeable directions.

Resistencia, platinum palladium print, A4, January, 2020

Kelli Perletti’s work crossreferences research that touches a variety of levels. It is a personal investigation about her roots, an in-depth exploration of femininity and its various expressions and significance, a search for meaning in the history of Guatemala and its link to colonialism, and, finally, an examination of how

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Now that Kelli’s work has reached a point of accomplishment and sees the light (is born) in the form of a lively and welldocumented thesis accompanied by a significant catalogue, I keep thinking of celebrated Austrian psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl who in 1946 wrote a crucial psychological memoir Man’s Search for Meaning - a meditation on what the ghastly experience of Auschwitz taught him about the primary purpose of life: the quest for meaning, which sustained those who survived. For Frankl, meaning came from three potential sources: tenacious and committed work, love, and courage in the face of difficulty.

Even in a completely different context, I feel these qualities appear in Kelli’s work, which is never dominated by a manic chase after goals and symbols of success. Her truer measure of success is the process by which success comes. It is her dedication to something meaningful. It is her

standard of excellence that she pushes herself to in each moment.

For two years I have had the privilege to work with Kelli and follow her progressions as an artist and a woman. Now that I am reading what I just wrote, I am not sure what comes first, the artist or the woman. These two aspects mingle and beautifully emerge in waves, alternatively and never prevailing over each other; they are tied together with an invisible and resilient thread. As Nietzsche wrote, “He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how.” 1 From the very beginning, Kelli’s photographic work has shown a capacity to adapt to diverse situations and find new ways of expressing different concepts.

Her self-portrait series comprised very powerful and engaging photographs that were both moving and enlightening. The more she delved into her research, the more she was able to find and reveal her boundless sensitivity.

What I find extraordinary in Kelli’s artwork is the capacity to explore different territory with a fresh eye, always permeated with a personal touch. She is a curious artist, and she is fearless. No matter what she decides to explore, she fights until she accomplishes superior results. Be it artwork on scotchtape, gritty and fascinating, or delicate Platinum-Palladium

prints that evoke a timeless sense of spiritual spaces, Kelli is able to find the right voice for her subjects. She is able to express intimacy and respect, integrity and sincerity; her images have a poetic feel and succeed in providing access to her emotions that become universal, allowing the viewer to immediately connect in a mutual empathic process.

To conclude, here is a quote by Viktor Frankl that mirrors how Kelli conducted her research: “Don’t aim at success - the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one’s dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself.

Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long run - in the long run, I say! - success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think of it.” 2 1 Nietzsche, Friedrich. Maxims and Arrows in Die Götzen-Dämmerung - Twilight of the Idols. London: Penguin Classics, 1990.

2 Frankl, Viktor. Preface to the 1992 Edition in Man’s Search for Meaning. Fifth Edition.

Boston: Beacon Press, 2006.

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Interview: Kelli M. Perletti Carla Villanueva, MA in Art History (SACI ‘20)

What is the importance and relevance of your most current body of work in today’s art world?

My most current body of work, Sweet River; True Peace, is important to today’s art world because of its reliance on collaboration, in all steps of the process. It aims to be ethically mindful and to bring to attention what great cultures are at risk of being lost.

My approach as a photographer is to be as representative and collaborative as possible through every step of my work. I have spent the last five years working with the Maya Q’eqchi’ communities in Alta Verapaz and Rio Dulce, Guatemala.

I am continually educating myself on the issues they face, and within that process, have helped start a nonprofit organization to address and provide resources for the communities as requested by the residents themselves, primarily in the education sector. My overall goal is to bring awareness through this photographic body of work to the challenges faced currently and in the recent past by these communities as well as, on a larger scale, all indigenous peoples.

Because my current body of work is with indigenous communities in a country that is not my own, where just the color of my skin gives me an inherent privilege,

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I have felt that it is incredibly important to collaborate on how to portray the situation versus going in from entirely my own perspective. Ethically speaking, it is not without its flaws because the body of work is curated and photographed from my perspective as an outsider. However, I have taken steps to diminish my influence in the work by developing on site, getting photo releases and being communicative and transparent about what I am doing and how the images will be used, and continually distributing photographic prints to the people so they have copies of the works as well. Furthermore, my plan is to teach photographic skills to the communities and, over time, remove myself from the narrative entirely.

What materials do you use and what is their role in your process?

My materials are not typical, each for a specific reason. The vast majority of my images are developed on site with a homemade recipe of Caffenol-C developer, allowing me to develop with coffee and other natural materials in the rural jungles and mountains of Guatemala. Because of my ability to develop on site, the film has not only captured the light of the images taken, but has been bathed in the water and physically touched and interacted

with by the people photographed (often!) – accumulating dust and other environmental marks of that world.

Taking the images back to Italy, I have not cleaned or re-fixed the images in order to preserve as much of the impact of indigenous villages in Guatemala as possible.

I have scanned over 600 images all as color negatives, even when black and white, to retain the color casts of the film itself.

My choices for printing the body of work refer to inherent value.

Part of the body of work is printed in Platinum Palladium, the most archival and renowned fine art photographic printing process that often takes years to master.

Alongside the noble prints are Tape Image Transfers, a process that utilizes clear packing tape and laserjet prints. This process is among the cheapest of processes, yet their beauty transcends their actual material value. The juxtaposition of noble and cheap aims to represent how we value people and materials, and how these values should be called into question.

perhaps it has driven me to spend more time perfecting my craft in the darkroom. It has exposed me to numerous great mentors – Romeo, Jacopo, Alessandra, Lucia and Tommaso – and inspirational staff like Roberta and Donatella, to name a few.

What dialogue does your work have with current political, social, and cultural factors?

My work is politically engaged by highlighting the harmful relations the government and mainstream culture have with Indigenous peoples, how religion plays a role, and the global movement towards assimilation. Sparking partially from the current movement of Guatemalans I personally know immigrating to the United States, it also talks about the difficulties that push people to immigrate to the United States – people that continually talk about immigration as a dream to climb up out of extreme poverty, much like my ancestors did.

How has living and studying in Florence influenced your work?

Living in Florence has been a challenge for me because I love nature and hate crowds, so

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Iris Richardson MFA in Studio Art

Iris Richardson’s recent research explores metaphors connected to skin. She works with a series of closeup photographs of organic peels and vegetable films. The macro images she photographs have a shallow depth of field, allowing only a fraction of the organic skins to be in focus.

This process removes the original identity, making it unrecognizable. The printed images are then peeled away from their original support, the paper, turning them back into skin again. The outcome is an ambiguous and transparent surface, suspended between the scientific sample and a pictorial dimension of photography.

The surfaces, disembodied from their original identities, represent a contestation of society with its rules, laws, and expectations imposed on contemporary subjectivities.

Iris Richardson was born in Hückelhoven, Germany. She attended Rowan University where she received her BFA in Studio Arts in 2017. She attended SACI Florence to complete her MFA in Studio Art. She was a founder of UDK Berlin/SACI Florence “In Contatto” Art Projects, a graduate artist-run art exchange between the Universität der Künste Berlin and SACI Florence in 2019.

Left: Skin Tones, acrylic ink print emulsion, A3, 11 X 17 inches, 2020 Above: Installation view of the exhibition, La terza cosa (The Third Thing),in the Maidoff Gallery

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Iris Richardson Above: Acrylic in Silver, acrylic paint skin, 22 X 5 inches, 2020 Right: Physalis Peruviana in Green, acrylic ink print emulsion, A3, 11 X 17 inches, 2020

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Iris Richardson Above & Right: Skins, acrylic ink print emulsion, A3, 11 X 17 inches each, 2020

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Critical Text: Iris Richardson Jacopo Santini, MFA in Photography Program Co-Director

Iris’s skin is particularly sensitive. Her independence and determination to defend it are equaled only by her curiosity and unrhetorical attitude.

She cultivates in herself two vocations: her genuine passion for food, which led her to become a chef and then a renowned food photographer, and that for art, which guided her to Florence and to restless experimentations and explorations animated by the desire to find her language, her voice.

I find in her final body of work an ideal metaphor for her approach not only to art but to life in general: searching is somehow like digging or peeling off, just to realize, eventually, that the target of the search was already before her eyes.

As a cook, she tried, failed, and transformed until she found a direction, along the way and after countless pentimenti.

Her approach reminds me of a sentence by John Berger about photography, which, he said, “doesn’t entail the time of its making.” Right or not, Berger alluded to the immediacy of photography — the almost imperceptible gap that separates the initial impression from its recording — and, maybe, to the photographer’s ontological impossibility to take advantage of the gifts of time and of slowness.

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Iris ended up denying such an influential insight, at the same time intuiting the very nature of photography and its possibilities; far from being just the automatic and monolithic process mocked

by Baudelaire, photography, and its indexical substance, could become not only the tool but also the object of her research.

“A photographic print” — states Stephen Shore at the beginning of his The Nature of Photographs — “is, in most instances, a base of paper, plastic or metal that has been coated with an emulsion of light-sensitive metallic salts coupled with vegetable or metallic dyes. In some prints, the base is coated directly with or imprinted with dyes, pigments, or carbon. A photograph is flat, it has edges, and it is static; it doesn’t move.

While it is flat, it is not a true plane. The print has a physical dimension.”

A photograph, when considered at a physical level, is a skin. Like the skin, a print has more layers: the epidermis (the protective layer), the dermis (the light-sensitive emulsion), and the hypodermis (the paper base). This is where Iris found the solution to her dilemma.

If the skin is a polysemic metaphor — as it can be either a barrier, a membrane, something that protects or makes possible an

exchange of energy, nourishment, or information — she could apply and project her view of the content (the skin and its fragile harmony) to the medium of her choice: photography. Iris, in fact, worked with emulsion transfers that let her peel off the superficial layer of the printed image, usually closeups of vegetable or fruits, from its paper support, in order to lend that “skin� or, to be more precise, epidermis, an autonomous, almost sculptural status, even and above all if separated from what society considers the valuable content. While focusing on the idea of skin as a metaphor for underrated values in the age of consumerism, she also challenged the concept of index by turning her representations of skins (traces or indexes) into real, tangible, frail skins and, by doing so, establishing an unpredicted correspondence: the index is the content. A true mise en abyme.

Installation view of the exhibition, La terza cosa (The Third Thing)

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Interview: Iris Richardson Carla Villanueva, MA in Art History (SACI ‘20)

What materials do you use and what is their role in your process?

For my paintings, I use oil paints and I paint on linen and cotton canvas. For my photography, I have been using a waterslide inkjet paper, which allows me to remove the emulsion of the paper and create a transparent image.

I came about using this paper after the traditional media 8X10 Polaroids I had planned to use were unattainable, as they have been discontinued. The technique I planned to use has fallen out of favor. Ageism is one of the topics I wanted to address in my work, and I felt using a mostly forgotten technique was a perfect connection. The water decal paper allows me to create a similar effect, but also allows me to use the emulsion on its own, which I would not have been able to do with the Polaroid emulsion. The results are seemingly a delicate transparency.

How has living and studying in Florence influenced your work?

I grew up in Germany and lived in Europe, so coming to Florence felt like coming home. I felt very comfortable living in Florence from day one. As a professional artist, it has been a while since I have had time to work on my own projects for an extended period of time. Being here in Florence, I have been able to work on a new body

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of work. The greatest benefit I see is the international community I am exposed to here at SACI and in Florence, as well as our travels throughout Europe.

What is the importance and relevance of your most current body of work in today’s art world?

What dialogue does your work have with current political, social, and cultural factors?

The concept of my work builds on the metaphor of skin. My macro images have a shallow depth of field allowing for only a fraction of the organic skins to be in focus. By doing so, I am removing the original identity to make it unrecognizable. By printing those images, I restore my work to a recognizable media only to peel the emulsion from the body, which supports the image returning to a new layer of skin.

The world has a societal layer with rules, laws, and expectations imposed on its inhabitants.

The fabric of our existence as humans is built on this structure, a structure that has been in place for so long that it is difficult to change despite its obvious faults.

It is built upon inhumane practices and inequality. Artificial labels created by a few in order to divide us through economics, gender, age, and race support those inequalities.

As a society, we have accepted this way of living and few question it, despite its side effects on the daily life. Much like junk foods are taking over our healthier diets, the money and consumerism are replacing our human values such as love, meaning, connections, and compassion. Life has become a machine designed to neglect our inner values and quality of life.

None of the labels change that the common connection between all living things is skin.

All living beings need food for survival, which is one of the most fundamental human needs after air and water.

Studies today show a rise in depression, anxiety, and loneliness. The common denominators are loneliness, no control over one’s job, and lack of outdoor activities, food, water, shelter, physiological needs, and being surrounded by people who value you. We have become a society of humans with unmet needs. For the first time in human history, we have dismantled our tribe. The current system treats this disconnect devoid of basic human values using chemical solutions, artificial solutions that create artificial and temporary relief.

In countries where modern medicine is not as easily available,

Skins, acrylic ink print emulsion, A3, 11 X 17 inches each, 2020

doctors deal with depression using a holistic and natural approach by going back to basic human values and needs. They do this by listening to their patients and use their community to help them recover.

Art is such a conductor aiding the medical profession in treatments for depression and trauma. It brings together communities, and it is blind to the labels. It connects humans on a primal level throughout history and no entity has been able to suppress it effectively.

After my graduation, I plan to continue my work doing community outreach and projects.

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Lucia Simental MFA in Studio Art

Lucia Simental’s research examines the physio-psychological diversity of women through the allegory of plant morphology. She is explicitly interested in how complicated and beautiful flowers are, along with their strength, and how they can represent the fragility of beauty and the ability to flourish under adversity.

This exploration has allowed Lucia to engage in the ongoing debate of the evolution of the matriarchy in society. Her ceramic pieces are abstractions of botany that portray the intricacy and splendor of the female experience. She has created forms that communicate the universal adversities women endure and actively carry through life. The resilience of women is examined in parallel with the chaotic violence in nature itself: the cycle of abuse and neglect leading to rebirth and regrowth.

This resulting trauma is the spark that ignites evolutionary change. Lucia chooses to highlight the beauty hidden in chaos by illuminating the whimsical and repetitive forms of growth in the medium of clay.

Lucia Simental is a MexicanAmerican ceramic sculptor with a focus in installation. Her artwork explores feminine identity by utilizing organic and floral motifs.

She has a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Ceramics with a minor in Art History from the New Hampshire Institute of Art, and has completed her MFA degree at SACI with a concentration in Ceramics, with the goal of furthering her practice as a ceramic sculptor in community-based installation projects and teaching traditional and contemporary ceramics.

Left: Jardín de Mujeres exhibition installation, Maidoff Gallery, 2020 Right: Witches’ Sabbath (2019-2020), Red Daisy, 31x21x13”, 2019; Blue Lupine, 39x14x9”, 2020; Yellow Sunflower, 2020, 34x16x16”, clay, spray paint

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Lucia Simental Above: Trinity (I) Society, 20x21x33”, (II) Domestic Violence, 15x16x29”, (III) Rape, 15x17x23”, clay, 2019, and details Right: Recollections of Aroma, 4x3x1” each, soaps, 2020 Pages 62-63: Women at the Table, 73x45x37”, clay, 2019

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Mother Earth Takes Form: Lucia Simental Daria Filardo, Curator and SACI Graduate Instructor

Defining the work of an artist is always a challenge. The art realized by an artist changes according to the urgencies of a specific moment of research. Art also changes in the eyes of the viewer, resonating from time to time with special aspects of the art object.

Even if we know this, we search for words that translate and interpret visual language. Words on art live in another space of the creative process and are often, even in an oral exchange of opinions, needed as much as the art itself.

The art object lives in space; words live in a sequential, narrative time. Words approach the visual and bring this experience into a discursive realm. It is a different approach, and art can’t be substituted by words — it is an incomplete and non-exhaustive experience — but words can provide a lateral, yet fundamental, perception of the object.

It is not easy to give a sense of the very special material presence that Lucia Simental’s sculptures possess, but I will try to individuate some words that can put us in that experiential space.

Mother Earth: the force of Nature from which Simental gets inspiration. It is a female strength, a generative power, the beginning

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and the end of a cycle. It provides the essential material these sculptures are made of: clay.

Nature: the biological world she represents through the image of flowers. Simental’s work embodies metaphors for fragility and continuous rebirth, the idea of beauty, the pervasive presence, the endless germination even on ruins, the color of life, and the varieties of forms. Flowers grow in cultivated gardens and in wild territories. Lucia Simental links the feminine presence and essence and its human and social condition to the natural element of flowers (very present in art history, but freed from a simplistic or kitsch interpretation in her work).

Women: the subject of Simental’s research, which starts from her own experience as a Latina artist living in the USA (and traveling around the world), observing the reality around her and transforming it through clay into very complex sculptural bodies of work usually made of many pieces.

Included in her creations are a trilogy of wounded vases where the wounds are healing through the internal growth of flowers.

These large vases are women who took in personal, domestic, or social violence and are healing.

Flowers are the symbol of this continuous rebirth.

Women are also represented as real-size busts with flower heads, a circle of six women (witches, as a metaphor for the persecution of women by society throughout history) in every stage of their lives, bonding together.

Lucia Simental’s sculptures inhabit the same space we do.

Ceramic and clay are not singular pieces of functional objects, but sculptures that share our space and resonate with our lives.

and learning experience enriches the final outcome and challenges society through an expanded collective learning process.

With these few words, one can trace the material, symbolic, poetic, and social aspects of Lucia Simental’s artistic practice, all of which make Simental a very multifaceted young artist, and it will be interesting to follow her future research.

As a woman artist using ceramics, Simental is renewing and referring to many women artists who took artisanal techniques and brought them to a different dimension.

Her installations are populated by several elements — like a table setting where plates, bottles, cutlery are overwhelmed by petals and are impossible to use — and fill every void of the installation space, as well as the mental space of the viewer, in a germinative, natural, continuous growth.

Social space: the space of the experience that Lucia Simental is expanding her work to include. By building a collective authorship through the manipulation of clay with different communities, she is offering the concrete knowledge of ceramics in building a piece together. Her experience as a woman resonates with others and, in these groups, the dialogue

Yellow Sunflower, 2020, 34x16x16”, clay, spray paint

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Interview: Lucia Simental Polina Nazarova, MA in Art History (SACI ‘20)

I hope to be able to make an exhibition with their work where I can place all of the flowers in an installation. I am not planning to glaze them, so they can reflect their own individuality.

Detail of Women at the Table, 73x45x37�, clay, 2019

What is the importance and relevance of your most current body of work in today’s art world?

My main focus is to talk about women and positivity. My art demonstrates how working with nature intertwines with femininity.

I choose flowers as a symbol of women in my artworks. My art combines two aspects: fragility and strength of women that are associated with the qualities of ceramics. Similar to ceramics, women are very strong and delicate at the same time. My art, therefore, tries to promote positivity and self-love. Currently, I am working on a community project with an association of women called Nosotras. Each woman creates her own flower that reflects her life in the final piece. At the end of this project,

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My current work is about representing women and the reality of life as a woman in society. I show all body types, moving into how we see ourselves during different stages of life: youth, maternity, maturity. The next three statues of women that I am going to make will be depictions of the following conditions: obesity, childhood, and breast cancer survivor. My work also aims to explore how the spectrum of colors can be used to reflect different women. In addition to ceramics, I use soap as a medium.

For me, it represents the routine of women in their homes. I associate carving soap with the routine of most females cleaning and taking care of their homes, just like my routine of carving a piece of soap. I am following the same routine and experiencing the nostalgic smell, which makes me remember my home and the female members of my family. The three vases that I made for the exhibition are based on the experience of women that I have met. The color red is connected with rape, yellow is associated with societal pressures, and pink is being used to symbolize domestic abuse.

The flowers inside and the petals

symbolize healing. My works do not purely concentrate on the negative side of society, but also on the positive outlook for those women who experience healing and become new people.

What materials do you use and what is their role in your process?

I primarily work with ceramics. I really connect with that medium because I used it heavily in my undergraduate. I draw comparisons between clay and its firm association with Mother Nature and life; it is both fragile and strong simultaneously. It makes the process of creating much more personal, as there is a lot of energy involved in the process and it is labor-intensive. I really enjoy all of the steps. When I was in high school, I always considered art to be drawing and painting. After taking sculpture at an advanced level, I fell in love with clay.

I chose to use soap as a secondary medium due to the strong implicit relationship this material has with the domestic female experience.

How has living and studying in Florence influenced your work?

I had to embrace my surroundings.

I was excited that there is a lot of influence historically in Florence on ceramics. The community of women I worked with really inspired my work. People, as

individuals, are my main source of inspiration. Coming from a school that focused more on a traditional style of ceramics, I found the encouragement to experiment in my work at SACI allowed me to build upon my foundation.

What dialogue does your work have with current political, social, and cultural factors?

My work opens a dialogue for activism for human rights, especially feminism. I believe that women should be encouraged to find their voice. There are so many definitions of feminism that people today are scared to express themselves. I don’t want it to be complicated. There is statistically an increase in domestic abuse, and we as women need to show our opinion. In the beginning, I was trying to make my works Mexican-American, but I realized that most women suffer the same patriarchal, religious problems, and we are all controlled by men. The society is “equally� bad all over the world. The issues of harassment and abuse are concerning, and most of us have met someone who has suffered from one of those issues. Women historically have been oppressed, and in recent decades it is more so linked to birth control, abortion, etc. Therefore, the purpose of my work is to show the world the necessity to change its attitude towards the female gender.

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Wayne Stoner MFA in Studio Art

Wayne investigates fleeting moments of light and shadow, images sparked by a moment in time that he translates pictorially in abstraction, thus finding the abstract in everyday reality. The works evolve from an observation and reflection process, a process of marking time that creates a separate moment in time for the viewer. Wayne explains his artistic process: “I work from imagery connected to my experiences and memory, often observing and recording a simple moment in time to kickstart an intuitive process that works in painting and mixed/ multi-media, from the general to the specific – refining by adding and subtracting. I tend to respond to my surroundings and mimic colors and seasons.

I consider my work finished, but only when viewed is it truly complete.”

Additionally, Wayne attempts to overlap both art and life; the passion he puts into creating is connected to the passion he puts into life, and his vision is to help others through a daily practice.

Wayne spent 26 years in the military traveling the world. The events of 9-11 led to another ten years of travel supporting the government. Early in his military career, he wanted to be an illustrator, and he has written and illustrated three children’s books as keepsakes for his children.

Near the end of his career in the military, he actively set out to find an art program that would allow him to work in an interdisciplinary manner. Wayne’s plan was simple: turn 180° out, change and reinvent himself; his new identity became a full-time art student and part-time hospice volunteer. His undergraduate experience fueled him with the tools needed to make art, and his graduate experience broadened all possibilities. Wayne has traveled extensively and is always preparing for the next trip. In January 2020, he had his solo show in Florence. Two weeks later, he flew to Paris as part of an International Artists Group for an exhibition at the Grand Palais.

These two shows provided him with the confidence to continue seeking opportunities to exhibit his work. http://waynestonerartist.com waynestonerartist

Left: New Light, oil on canvas, 130x150 cm, 2019

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Wayne Stoner Above: Source, oil on canvas, 120x160 cm, 2020 Right: Top of the Mark, oil on canvas, 180x210 cm, 2019

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Wayne Stoner Above: Uffizi, oil on canvas, 80x100 cm, 2020 Right: 9 Seconds Left Series 2, oil on canvas, 110x210 cm, 2020

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Critical Text: Wayne Stoner Vito Abba, Director, Studio Abba

Wayne Stoner works with light to create space. We can imagine the artist in the tranquillity of his studio, observing the changes that daylight makes on his field of vision. We imagine that he wants to present the viewer with a situation in flux or one simply passing by. The move from daylight to evening light. A barely traceable passage of time, like the slow movement of a curtain.

A movement that is then frozen, like a photograph, to provide the observer with a moment of calm. It is no coincidence that Wayne sometimes starts from a photographic shot to create a painting or from an image imprinted on his memory. The artist subjectively catches that moment of calm, certainly not through the neutral lens of the camera, to leave the observer with the task of reassembling the images and interpreting them.

Wayne fills the space with light: starting from the creation of shadows, he gives almost threedimensional depth to his canvases through the use of different tones of gray. He defines the depth of a room, or as far as the observer’s eye can see with a darker palette, tending towards black, and then with the cream or ice white of light, the depth is emphasized all the more. And it is this light that so fascinates Wayne, as for Edward Hopper who never tired of painting sunlight that entered closed

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spaces or lit up open spaces.

Wayne, captured by the light that warms the floor of his studio, finds the right angle to focus on the geometric shapes created by this light. The sun enters a room through a window that we do not see and creates shapes that are sometimes clear and precise or other times are filtered or softened by a curtain. Wayne focuses our attention on the geometric contrasts of light, as can be seen in his painting Top of the Mark, where he is more interested in the light on the structure of the large windows than in the panorama of the city that merges into the background. In his homage to Morandi, Shadows of Morandi - without doubt an artist whom he admires - the bottles and the cup are shadows on a wall. A wall this time in stark contrast to the floor, as in New Light. And if we take a closer look at the bottle, we notice that once again that light is the protagonist, because even in the shadow cast on the wall, we manage to see the sunlight that shines through the glass of the bottle.

In some works, the clear dividing lines that draw the boundaries of spaces, such as between the floor of a room and a wall, are much closer to abstraction. It is as if Wayne wants to invite the observer to focus on what is most interesting to him: a reflection or a shaft of light that enters a room

through the shape of a door, the shadow of a window projected on a light-toned wall, the window frame concealed by a curtain.

In this case the colors are soft: delicate nuances from pearl grey, dove grey to anthracite grey. His brush stroke is denser, visible, and his canvases present thicker lays of oil paints and become more tactile. Wayne wants the observer to interact with his paintings not only visually but also through touch, and he specifically invites viewers to feel his artworks. It is clear that he wants us to enter his spaces, inviting us into his rooms or his studio, to understand and share his artistic process.

The void in Stoner’s works is not a lack of meaning; it does not convey a cold feeling of solitude. On the contrary, it is the way to immerse ourselves in a space flooded with light, as in the painting New Light.

Like the Impressionists, Wayne paints without secrets, he wants to freely portray what he sees, whether it is an image left in his memory or a room where he finds himself painting, where he looks to communicate the fleeting sensations that he catches with that first glance. Wayne skillfully uses the potential of light to spontaneously reproduce his impressions. As for the Impressionists, and Wayne, the shadows are colored, as we can see in the paintings Source or New Light, a work that I have mentioned

several times because I consider it to be very representative of Wayne’s art at this moment in time. It is the painting that was exhibited in February 2020 at the Grand Palais in Paris with the OpenArtCode group of international artists as part of the Salon des Artistes Indépendants.

Wayne certainly has a point in common with the founding fathers of the Indépendants who, against tradition before the opening of the Salon, did not want to add the paint to the finished work that served to saturate the colors and create a polished surface. Wayne wants us to see the brushstroke; he doesn’t want the contours to be too defined. He wants us spectators to interpret the tones, shadows, and nuances. The Paris exhibition, one of Wayne’s first, will be followed by many others, because I am sure that his combination of passion, talent, and method will lead him on an interesting and fulfilling artistic journey that has only just begun.

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Interview: Wayne Stoner Mila Pinigin, MA in Art History (SACI ‘20)

How has living and studying in Florence influenced your work?

The colors are amazing, especially this time of year when it’s a little bit grayer. My palette is very earthy and neutral. I think the colors probably are the main thing, and then the shadows. The light here in the fall is really nice and creates well-defined shadows. I’m from the Pacific Northwest in Washington State and it’s rainy and gray in the winter, so being here in Florence and having light and shadow through the winter is really nice.

I’ve made some good friends that are amazing people, and they show me how to slow down, how to enjoy life. They have no problem stopping and talking to somebody even if they’re in a hurry; they tend to take enough time to be with people. Time is the most precious thing we have, so when you give that to somebody else, you’re giving a precious gift.

I have a pass for the Uffizi, so I’d go every week, walk around and take pictures, and just enjoy being there. I just can’t believe I could go there first thing in the morning and spend an hour or two and then go to school. One of my paintings, titled Uffizi, is inspired by the shadows on the floor there.

The thing that I really love here at SACI is, while we don’t have all the best tools or the best space, the teachers and the faculty

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are amazing. They have been so helpful and dedicated to making me a better painter. My mentor Pietro Manzo is fantastic and we’ve become friends.

How did you start to approach time in your work and has it always been there?

It hasn’t always been there, and it really kind of came around last spring. I was thinking about how we only have one year left here, and I feel like I wasted some time fretting about stuff and worrying about things at the beginning that were out of my control. I started thinking more and more about time, and I think at my age you start to consider time more seriously. When I was younger, I didn’t think that much about time; you’re either on time or you’re late and that’s as far as I thought about it. I believe in your youth you think you’re going to last forever, but as we age people come and go in our lives and we realize how little time we have. Then you start thinking about your own time and your own mortality. While I was doing my undergrad, I worked as a hospice volunteer with people that had very little time left, working and talking with them about how you want to spend the rest of your time with what little you have; what do you want to do?

Dates are really important to me, and I don’t think they were

when I was younger. I could never remember my mom or dad’s birthday or anything. My sisters would always remind me: “Call mom it’s her birthday today.” Now my mom has passed and I think about those times.

moment of rest, and in a really busy, weary world that we’re in, I think that is what is needed now.

It’s very interesting, I think, to be able to paint these fleeting moments of time. It is a fleeting moment for me, and that’s my experience, and now I’m trying to create another moment for the viewer. They’ll stand in front of a painting of mine and they’ll have their own experience.

Let’s touch back on the postaggression movement. What dialogue does your work have with current political, social, and cultural factors?

We are required to study all the different art movements from Anthropocene to feminism to decolonization, all these different things that are happening today, and there are so many things that are going on. The “Post-Aggression Movement” is kind of a joke, but it also rings true to me. I probably relate to a social practice the most, but time will tell if I connect that with art or if it is just another aspect of my life. For now, I feel my art is more aesthetic than political.

I’m not trying to say something; I’m trying to bring something before a viewer so they can just have a

9 Seconds Left Series 1, oil on canvas, 93x150 cm, 2019

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Studio Arts College International Master of Fine Arts Programs

SACI’s community of MFA students works in a creative environment of rigorous critical and technical inquiry, utilizing the unique artistic and cultural resources of Florence, Italy, to prepare students for careers as artists and college instructors. For a duration of two years, students live and work in the city that, during the Renaissance, revolutionized art and has since served as an inspiration and catalyst for generations of artists.

By fully exploiting the advantages available to emerging artists through advanced study in Florence, SACI MFA students can become highly competitive when seeking a professional artistic career and universitylevel teaching positions. Throughout their lives, they will be able to realize work reflecting their unique experience and deep understanding of Italian art and the nature of the artist’s role in society. www.saci-florence.edu

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INDEX Foreword

4

Introductions

5

Neha Ganesh Bharadwaj

9

Critical Text by Michael Reali 14 Interview by Mila Pinigin 16

Averi Biswas 19 Searching for a Center by Lisa Nocentini 24 Interview by Polina Nazarova 26

Tatjana Lightbourn 29 The Rheostat of Blackness by Justin Randolph Thompson 34 Interview by Mila Pinigin 36

Kelli M. Perletti 39 Critical Text by Alessandra Capodaqua 44 Interview by Carla Villanueva 46

Iris Richardson 49 Critical Text by Jacopo Santini 54 Interview by Carla Villanueva 56

Lucia Simental 59 Mother Earth Takes Form by Daria Filardo 64 Interview by Polina Nazarova 66

Wayne Stoner 69 Critical Text by Vito Abba 74 Interview by Mila Pinigin 76 Studio Arts College International 78

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EXHIBITION

This catalog (a box set of 7 individual booklets) is published in conjunction with the exhibition MMXX: The Year of Change, which was to be held at Frittelli Arte Contemporanea, Via Val di Marina 15, Florence, Italy, from April 8-22, 2020. Although the physical exhibition was canceled due to the COVID-19 global health crisis, this catalog features the final projects, critial texts, and interviews of graduating students in the MFA in Studio Art, MFA in Photography, and MFA in Communication Design programs at Studio Arts College International (SACI) in Florence, Italy.

TEXTS BY

Vito Abba, Steven Brittan, Alessandra Capodacqua, Romeo Di Loreto, Daria Filardo, Lisa Nocentini, Michael Reali, Jacopo Santini, Kirsten Stromberg, Justin Randolph Thompson, Camilla Torna

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Daria Filardo, Pietro Gaglianò, Regan Wheat, Lisa and Simone Frittelli, MA in Art History Graduates (SACI ‘20): Polina Nazarova, Mila Pinigin, Carla Villanueva

DIGITAL EXHIBITION COORDINATION Christina Gednalske, Špela Zidar

GRAPHIC DESIGN / COVER DESIGNS Naomi Muirhead / Neha Bharadwaj

PHOTO CREDITS

Diego De Franchis, Jacopo Santini, the artists

COPY EDITING

Christina Gednalske, Brianna Hayes

PRINTED BY

Litografia I.P. - Florence, Italy

ISBN (complete box set of 7 individual booklets) 9788885495074

Studio Arts College International Palazzo dei Cartelloni Via Sant’Antonino, 11 50123 Florence, Italy info@saci-florence.edu www.saci-florence.edu Copyright © 2020 Studio Arts College International, SACI Press. All rights reserved.

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ISBN 9788885495074