Kristina Colucci
SURFACE EXCAVATION:
New metal reliefs by Kristina Colucci
“The sun is a thousand rays in your belly. All the rest is nothing.”
It doesn’t matter what medium Kristina Colucci uses to make her art objects. It doesn’t matter that she encourages us with her tortured surfaces to get a little closer to what we are looking at. What does matter is that when we look closely at these works, we discover that they are powerful in their minimalist simplicity.
The small metal reliefs – none is more than 14 inches square – in her current series, SURFACE EXCAVATION, look like fossils found at an archeological dig sometime in the future. These objects, both painterly and sculptural, are three-dimensional pewter casts protruding from what looks like a bedrock support of oxidized metal. This once-molten metal that has been formed, shaped, painted, and distressed, holds layers of things embedded in it, things we recognize, things we might have left behind. There are tools, nails, organic materials, grids, plumbing parts, bugs, found objects, all with gorgeous detail - like threads on a machined car part – once overlooked, now captured in metal for all eternity.
Similar to the practice of encaustic painting, which Colucci has been engaged in for fifteen years, these metal reliefs are dense with layer and meaning. Poured metal is an obvious next step for an artist familiar with the science of molten materials and comfortable with the art of planned accidents. And she has fun with visual contradictions. Texture and color combine with objects we know to be opposites: hard and soft materials come together, like twine wrapped around a nail, and so on. When we confront these everyday materials/objects as fossilized moments of a culture’s life in time, we come to realize that the artist wants us to remember what we have made, what we value, what will last. Her art reminds us of the ways we live in the twenty-first century, and what we might leave for future generations to discover.
RESUME
Education
Bachelor of Fine Art, Cum Laude, University of Buffalo, Buffalo, NY - Major in Communications Design, minor in Printmaking
Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, Continuing Education in Visual Studies, Museum Studies, Marketing
Recent Workshops
2005, 2006 R&F Paints, Kingston, NY
2004 Vernon Street Studios, Somerville, MA
1997–2005 MacFarlane Fine Art, SommersworthK, New Hampshire
Exhibitions
2008 The Rymer Gallery, Nashville, TN
2007 Synthesis: New paintings, Harvard Neighbors Gallery, Cambridge, MA
2007 Hot: Artists respond to Global Warming, Depot Square Gallery, Lexington, MA
2007 Art Exhibition and Auction to benefit the Robert French Foundation, Cambridge, MA
2006 Somerville Cardboard Academy Exhibition, Diesel Cafe, Somerville, MA
2006 Cambridge Artist Association, Kathryn Schultz Gallery, Cambridge, MA
2005 Encaustic Painters Wax Poetic, Ashford Street Gallery, Boston, MA
1997–2007 Annual Show: juried exhibition, Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, MA