- Lucy Pistilli
- lucypistilli@gmail.com
- West Philadelphia
A Philadelphia-based artist with a background in painting, my recent work has become split between mixed media work on paper, and miniature dioramas/sculptures/jewelry. The primary unifying element of my work is that I am always exploring aspects of being human that are both strange and familiar, taboo and commonplace, in an attempt to destigmatize that which we avoid discussing yet are always thinking about. Both bodies of work also utilize found imagery/objects and reveal my obsession with detail.
My 2D work frequently focuses on death and/or ritualistic behavior. I would call myself a humanist. I'm fascinated and/or obsessed with the bizarre social dances we do while living. I also grieve the exclusion of death in our general daily dialogue. I think I have always been repulsed by my own culture's fear and denial of inevitable death, and am obliged to include it in my work with equal weight to other elements. I collect and reference imagery from discarded family photography, projecting my own experiences on scenes from the lives of others, and layering patterns/symbols that reference decay and other indications of the passage of time. The resulting imagery is often figurative but heavily deconstructed and densely layered with patterning, sometimes to a point near abstraction. I seek to express the way I see familiar things around me, like faces and commonplace moments in time, as ever-changing/existing in multiple states; I sometimes struggle to focus on things, like a kind of blindness, because it is so hard to see anything as just one image or moment without seeing all of its other states of existence simultaneously. The patterns in my work represent the future decay but also break up the singularity of an image, creating the space for movement or blur. I've recently been using more printing techniques in my work to explore these patterning and layering elements. In addition to found photography I collect natural objects like bark, lichens, mushrooms, and minerals and study the textures of decay and regrowth, translating them to a 2-dimensional language of line and pattern. I've spent much time studying and replicating the line-work of Victorian etched natural and medical illustrations to explore ways of expressing these textures in a 2D form. I've also been creating more entirely abstract pieces which initially were meant to be elaborate texture studies but have begun to stand on their own. This abstract pattern-based work has lead me to begin playing with fabric designs, some of which I've had digitally printed.
In my 3D work, I depict nudity through commonplace domestic scenes as well as art historic references such as Hieronymus Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights. Having encountered the victorian practice of carrying or wearing portable depictions of nudity, some pornographic and some loving keepsakes, I was intrigued by objects evidencing peoples’ ongoing struggle to confront the need to embrace hidden aspects of our being like the very naked bodies we cover with clothing daily. We obsessively attempt and fail to categorize nude depictions as sexual or platonic, refuse to openly discuss the subject without shame, and many of us cope by collecting objects to study in secret. Inspired by these relics of another era I began to collect and fill found vessels (pill/match boxes, lockets, pocket watches, rings) with tiny pocketable sculptural works. Within this vein of work I allow myself to explore in a more playful/absurdist way.
Both bodies of work are centered around the elements of human existence that we frequently consider morbid or inappropriate despite being inevitable parts of our experience, and are sometimes as much poetic or whimsical as dark or perverted.