A journey through new worlds in wonder
PHOTO EXHIBIT
Unanswered Prayers is a photo exhibit by Anna Paola Pizzocaro, a New York-based artist. The fine art photography images of this series invite the viewer into a world between dream and reality. Oceanic images combined with wildlife and human figures in urban settings become one, and viewers start wondering if what they see could possibly be an alternative to reality.
Embassy exhibition probes complexities of contemporary Italian art
by Alan Henney on Examiner.com
Read the article here (April 7, 2014)
TO VIEW ART SAMPLES ONLINE: CLICK HERE (select “Unanswered Prayers” tab)
IN COLLABORATION WITH
PHOTO ID REQUIRED
LOCATION
Embassy of Italy
3000 Whitehaven Street NW
Washington, DC 20008
RSVP FOR THE OPENING ON MARCH 20
Reservations available until March 20, 2014 at 4 PM
Reservations are available until we reach
capacity or by the above date/time (whichever comes
first.)
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PLEASE NOTE:
NO PARKING AVAILABLE ON PREMISES(LIMITED STREET PARKING)
A LIGHT REFRESHMENT WILL FOLLOW
ON VIEW – BY APPOINTMENT ONLY: MARCH 21 – MAY 22
March 21 through May 22, 2014
(Monday to Friday from 10am-12/2pm-4pm)
BY APPOINTMENT ONLY: email reservations requests at iicwashington@esteri.it
When you email your reservation request, please provide the following:
date
time
name of each guest
PLEASE NOTE: the date and time you request may not be available. You will receive a confirmation email. Not open on weekends or holidays.
MORE INFO
Wonders and Emotions. The journey continues. by H.E. Claudio Bisogniero
In 2013, Year of Italian Culture in the United States, we proposed a journey. A fascinating itinerary of concerts, showings, exhibitions and scientific seminars.
People who love to travel never stop planning and undertaking new adventures. And bringing their friends along. So, even this year, 2014, the journey through Italian culture continues. A journey along our extraordinary past, but also into the future of technology Made in Italy, and through the imagination of contemporary art.
Anna Pizzocaro offers us a tour that is visionary, intimate, and surreal. It is the daily clad in marvels. An apartment transformed into an aquarium. A bear on the sofa. Dolphins leaping in an area that was previously pavement. A litany of unheeded and astounding prayers. An incursion into reverie, surprise, and wonder.
Because what we wish to continue doing, this year as well, is to surprise and inspire.
Claudio Bisogniero
Ambassador of Italy to the United States of America
The artist’s vision of dream and reality by Ilaria Niccolini
A contemporary artist, today or in the past, has lived and lives the need to impress a ‘signal’ that communicates her/his vision, her art, her sensibility. And so her whole work is projected, almost constantly, towards the search for this mediation. And towards signifying, eliciting emotions, bringing memories back. Impressing, indeed.
Anna Paola Pizzocaro goes beyond this… you do not need to know her story, her broad and rich cultural and artistic background, to detect her vision, her love for all those things that ‘run over’ our lives with its incessant events, big and small. Stopping for an instant in front of the ‘creatures’ in Unanswered Prayers is enough to be enveloped by something that, often, not even the most highly considered talents are able to donate: wonder.
Wonder that appears on our faces in front of the bear standing on a couch. You do not want to let go of it, but right beside it, the flamingos that rhythmically stroll on their elegant legs are already calling you, to draw another ‘oh!’ out of you.
It is impossible not to abandon ourselves to the spell of these images. The harmonious equilibrium woven by the artist between the colors and the sharpness of each photograph, between the subjects and the context of each image, between the surrealism and the daily concreteness of each shot, leads the spectator to live, for a while, a personal wandering between dream and amazement. A wandering through which we are accompanied by a mixture of curiosity and sweetness, of fear and tranquility.
Then, when this happens, when an artist is able to absorb our participation to the point of donating an all-encompassing emotion, a dream that goes well beyond our subjective capacity to appreciate beauty, then the magic is ensured.
And suddenly we need a concrete signal to realize we are no longer in Noah’s Ark of our daily lives, but we actually are in the exhibition space in the Italian Embassy in Washington, DC. Anna Paola has given us this wonder, and has cradled us for a while between dream and reality.
Ilaria Niccolini
The Lives They Lived by Renato Miracco
“The shadow world of depths is an exact replica of our daily conscience, it just needs to be perceived in a different way, in an imaginative way.”James Hillman, “The Dream and the Underworld”
During the course of our lives, we all create our own style, that is unique and that we cannot relinquish. It is the result of our way of thinking, of interacting, of performing every little gesture such as drinking a cup of coffee, or laughing. This truth, that applies to each one of us, becomes especially appropriate when we encounter people such as artists, who have devoted their lives to the search for a personal style that identifies them, and that is at the same time private and communicative.
Their ‘artistic artifact’ can become, from the social point of view, a beautiful work, a groundbreaking, tasteful, and pleasing one, or on the contrary it can be considered unpleasant, false, ugly, disagreeable, irreverent and desecrating. What can never be missing, though, is the contextualization of the artwork, the fact that it is part of a flow of knowledge that often goes beyond contingent reality, and positions itself in a meta-historic dimension. The artwork then becomes, among other things, the communication to the outside world of a story that the artist, the shaman, the subject, shares with the spectator.
I realize that the idea of the artist as a shaman is a Romantic one. The artists today wants to be considered a reporter, more than a shaman. But I believe that the true artist is the one who is able to translate a series of images into emotions. Unfortunately, our difficulties in understanding our partly based on language. We have just a single word – image – to describe consecutive images, perceptual images, oneiric images, and metaphorical images expressed as images.
According to Edward Casey’s definition, an image is not the contents of what we see, but a mode of seeing. The subject of Art is therefore the space that artists fill with an attitude deriving from sensations that they have experienced themselves in the first place. The result is a privileged place, be it a painting, a photograph, an installation, from where to observe the surrounding reality.
While the scientific symbol abbreviates reality and makes it poorer by providing an abstract representation of it, art, and in this specific case the photographic composition, implies a process of intensification and concretization of reality. A photograph can represent an object of the visible world but it can also symbolize an idea, a vision of the represented world, or even express the conscious or unconscious spirit of the artist.
I believe that contemporary art can be interpreted through a common notion of symbolic form, as a way to transform a world of merely passive impressions into a universe of pure spiritual expressions. The goal of this theoretical introduction was to explain that Anna Paola’s photographs, whose exhibition here at the Embassy I have strongly advocated for, should be interpreted in a meta-historic dimension, but also represent an extremely open viewpoint on reality. At first glance we remain amazed and surprised, but soon the “invasion” of exotic animals in our formal living rooms becomes completely normal. I mention the living room because our search for reassurance sometimes overcomes our natural curiosity, that would push us to go beyond the familiar world that surrounds us.
This is exactly what Anna Paola is trying to do: she pushes our “vision” to extremes, hoping that this will widen our optical perspective and our perceptual conscience. And if, therefore, a sensation of joy, or anguish, or surprise grips our heart and our stomach, let’s welcome it! It means that the Artist (with a capital A) has obtained her goal, donating us a new “point of view” on our daily lives.
Renato Miracco
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