801 Ocean Drive, Miami Beach
Booth E011
Diaries is a multi-medium exhibition curated for The Contemporary Art Modern Project’s booth at SCOPE Art Show Miami Beach 2022.
Through small ‘journals’ of art, Sooo-z Mastropietro, Stefano Ogliari Badessi, Julie Peppito, Jenny Perez, Ziesook You, and Silvana Soriano share their experiences as lessons we can accept, interpret, or even ignore. The booth plays with color, form, and media to encourage visitors to experience and explore the worlds, characters, and stories the artists are sharing. Integral to the booth are a sense of playfulness and intimate dialogues offering both an escape and a familiar place, similarity and difference.
Stefano Ogliari Badessi, the only male artist in the booth, presents masks that although playful and imaginative in their execution, highlight and expose universal characteristics of personality. The interactive masks draw attention to the strength of these characteristics while revealing how they can hinder one. Playful as they may be, they are still capable of limiting one’s ability to truly see, a feature reinforced by the absence of eyes. With the exception of the Illuminated Mask, which has traveled through all the negative qualities of personality and has reached the desired plane of illumination, the subversion of sight is the strongest element in the works. Miami-based artist Jenny Perez plays with both abstraction and form, and tones and shades to mirror the nuances of what is internal. This tension is encapsulated in unexpected shapes, positing a freedom of acceptance towards what is unexpected, but also the confidence to make the statement of individuality.
Silvana Soriano, also based in Miami, exposes some of the ridiculousness of what we all consider modern society with an experimental use of color, collage, and language to satirize idiomatic language. Soriano’s works serve the purpose of a diary kept by the artist with musings on life and language, which she openly shares with the viewer, and though idioms often entertain, they also harm; a key to understanding the work. New York artist Julie Peppito’s mixed-media sculptures play with expectations, often rooted in childhood innocence, and brings them forward into the present cultural and social arena, apparently fixating on both humor and the hybrid. It seems more likely that, once again language, is involved. In this case, the language used is symbolic and meanders through labyrinths of imagination to create a new universal, that of open interpretation and a willing acceptance of joy.
Lastly, Connecticut-based artist Sooo-Z Mastropietro explores a microcosm of her creation, bursting with color and fibers that appear to spread and crawl in directions away from the center, but always dependent on that same locus. Just as we all imagine our individuality as somehow unique and maybe even defiant, when in truth we are still linked and bound to our own self same center, whether that be ourselves, community, culture, what have you, we are still bound.
The practice of making art often begins in a thought, a note, a doodle—something very personal to the artist, who then works on the idea through the layers of imagination, frustration, uncertainty, joy, and satisfaction. The process can be likened to entries in journals full of memories, thoughts, fears, wishes, joys. It is act that validates the idea of being here, being something of matter, of our journeys through this thing called life. The viewer’s connection and consideration of the works in the booth are meant to be a confrontation. What is one left with, and how does one note that they were here?
Curation and statement by Melanie Prapopoulos
