Silvia Trappa’s set of work over the past year has explored these physical and mental boundaries that our thoughts allow us to inflict upon ourselves, doubling the layer of quarantine that our society was forced to undergo in the name of preservation.
A forced solitude takes upon itself two very contrasting forms; in which one is deemed a jail, a punishment either self-inflicted or pushed upon, and alternatively the more positive outlook as a way of seclusion for one to take the time to meditate and research in a perfectly controlled environment. Within this definition, our consciousness has created a prison of its own design, in which our personal solitude does not need to be a place, but rather can be within our thoughts.
Silvia Trappa’s set of work over the past year has explored these physical and mental boundaries that our thoughts allow us to inflict upon ourselves, doubling the layer of quarantine that our society was forced to undergo in the name of preservation. The exploration of a mind in its most naive and critical state, in that of a child, to the parasitic fungus-like effect our short exposure on this earth has had on the planet, Trappa uses the spectrum of time within the human experience to convey the introspections into our societal and personal demeanor. The flow of works tells a story woven through the harsh reality of an experience that in the need of safety was thrown upon each one of us, where not everyone emerged unscathed, physically and emotionally.
The mental domain in which Trappa places the ideas and thoughts communicated through her sculptures extends in a recent series deemed SMALL THINGS, a large installation of smaller individual papier-mâché pieces, a trademark of her work. The naivete of a child’s mind seeking to occupy whatever available distraction presents forth this feeling of tachysensia, where the distraction becomes so absolute that seconds feel like they turn into minutes, into hours. Our feeling of time so skewed by being contained for the past year brings a realization not too dissimilar in our need to try and occupy ourselves, in whatever fashion we could possibly grasp at. When left to our own devices the human mind fills in the void by tightening together the gaps, omitting swathes of time where we missed fulfilling vital needs. The need of contact is among those, and in a change of media, Trappa’s HOLD ME aims at the desires of external contact within the same period. The solitude of a planet being able to convey messages across itself in the span of an instant yet unable to come to terms with itself presents an uncanny irony in our nature as a expressive society. But the repression of these facts do not come without cost, as our needs can be met so long as the supply is maintained, and when the supply is cut in the form of not meeting our quota of interaction, our mental fort locks itself down with no way of expressing outward anymore. Yet it is inherent in our nature to demand more than we can supply in all aspects of life, as MUFFA so clearly depicts, as we have become parasitic to the very planet we inhabit. Unable to quell our own demands, our use as a race has far exceeded what we have been able to return back to nature.
There is peace to be achieved amongst the state of humanity in the physical realm and in the mental realm as well. Silvia Trappa’s pieces aim to communicate that this peace can in fact be achieved, by forcing an acknowledgment that we have strayed from the path. It is not an ideological preaching, nor a wantful desire, it is a balance amongst all things that needs to be reached. A balance in mental fortitude, of needs and wants, and of what we can give back to nature, our society, and ourselves.
