THE BAY WINDOW PROJECT
Artists in a Frame
curated by sybin
DAVIDE D’ELIA > Tropical Aryballoi
From Wednesday 22 June
SybinQ Art Projects
The window on Cleveland Street
London W1T 6DP
Back again after the success of last year, The Bay Window Project continues to be an opportunity for young and established artists to create a site-specific work in uncommon settings. Beyond the white-cube display, the artwork forcefully enters the private sphere of a flat to be seen by an extemporaneous, unaware public. The aim is to map the evolution of site-specific art in a non-institutional environment.
The first 2011 artist invited to exhibit in The Bay Window is DAVIDE D’ELIA.
Davide D’Elia produces works that often re-value modern aesthetic graphic terminology by presenting itself beyond object and objectivity. He very much focuses on the vocabulary of the neglected and the degraded. By for example artificially creating the conditions for mould to grow, he bends the flow of time to his needs and questions the viewer about the process behind it. This creates what he had decided to be an object of art out of the spontaneous hands of nature.
For The Bay Window Project, Davide presents the work Tropical Aryballoi, 2011 (Living Still Life: Perforated vinyl, table, plant, magazines, books, candles, glass, stones, plywood, light. Dimensions variable.)
When Davide D’Elia first surveyed the bay window, all we were talking about was the way he works with mould, creating the conditions for it to grow spontaneously. For all the duration of the process, which requires high humidity condition and a meticulous chemical practice, he likes to live the environment he is going to contaminate, disrupting its normal function, violating the immaculate white gallery walls and leaving baffled visitors wondering about effective methods to efface mould. Being related with a different kind of environment – that is, the private dimension of an already inhabited flat, D’Elia had chosen a different kind of process; the negotiation with both the curator and the occasional viewer from the street. The fact that he couldn’t live the environment he was going to intervene into, led him to invent a parallel space based on the effects of warm and cold light, daylight and darkness.
As Davide observes, “the light in which we live conditions our mood, our perception of things and our domestic rites. The light we project outside through windows, be it warm or cold, reveals the DNA of our modus vivendi. Our micro-domestic world relates with the outside by transmitting signals, both territorial and individual, to passers by who can decide to receive, or ignore, such signals.” Playing around with the few elements available to him – a plant, a table with elements on it, old vertical blinds and bits and pieces of ordinary life’s accumulation, he created Tropical Aryballoi, a two-faced container that changes at the change of light, revealing itself only to the most diligent of spectator. Tropical Aryballoi is a living still life, always the same but in fact ever-changing.
The display runs 22 June – 13 July.
The artist wishes to thank photographer Serena Andreini for her kind assistance. For further information please visit www.davidedelia.com
Davide D’Elia (Born in 1973 near Salerno, Italy) lives and works between Rome and London. Selected Shows: 2011 - Strange cross, Ex elettrofonica, Rome (IT); 2010 - Yesterday I distractedly called upon my mind memories not mine…I was by them enlivened, Ex elettrofonica, Rome (IT); 2009 - Beyond Existence, Cordy House, London (UK); 2009 – 3500 Square Centimeters, 27th Biennal Graphic Art, Lujbljana (SL). 2008 - Every other day, Zico House, Beirut (RL).
Will Come Next: CATHERINE BERTOLA in July.
