Everything is Entrance: Lori Esposito
Opening Reception: Saturday, May 11, 2013 6-9PM
Show Runs: May 11 - June 23
Lori Esposito’s exhibition, Everything is Entrance, is an immersion into the kinesthetic rhythms of the mind, body and motion. Esposito’s works pulse with a life force that expands and contracts like Rorschach tests on acid.
Her drawings are a study of the habitual gestures of everyday life, recording how humans interact and move within our environment. Esposito focuses on repetitive gestures and subtle variations there within, marking the uniqueness of each pass. "When we don’t recognize something, we understand it as being other, mystical mysterious, transformative," says Esposito. "I’m seeking that for myself." Simple gestures become complex and visually arresting patterns as they are retraced transcending and transforming the banal into icons of human behavior. Works like Nesting Season have a transcendent complexity akin to Tibetan Mandalas or Christian labyrinths. "Part of the meditative transcendence comes from a process grounded by materials and understanding what materials really are," says Esposito. These tightly rendered large-scale drawings are created with oil based drawing implements (oil pastels, crayons and bars) establishing permanent records of ephemeral acts.
Her performative series, called Animal, Vegetable, Mineral, Digital, began as a way to explain her conceptual framework and process, the actions and gestures that inspire her more traditional works. Esposito records a visual mantra, using hands, feet and hair to push a mixture of vegetable shortening and chalk powder on the paper. In a hyper-fast world, sharing the careful movements that inspire her can explain her intentions more thoroughly than words alone. The paintings she creates with these acts “inform the more permanent work, and are similar in terms of process (displacing material to record gesture)”-though the resulting temporal products are a more immediate and direct interpretation of human landscapes, both the mental and physical that inspire her. Esposito will demonstrate this method of the body as painting implement in a performance of her piece Animal, Vegetable, Mineral, Digital during the opening reception at SooVAC in the main gallery.
She received an MFA in studio art from North Carolina, Chapel Hill and an MA from Ohio University. Her work has been published in art and science journals and numerous exhibition and collection catalogs, most recently Studio Visit and Manifest Gallery's International Drawing Annual 7. She has received numerous private and public awards and residencies and lectured throughout the US and internationally at universities such as the Universities of Notre Dame and Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany. In addition to exhibiting her work at museums, art centers and galleries such as the Irvine Contemporary, the Headlands Center for the Arts, the Columbus Museum of Art and the Corcoran, her work has also been included in international art fairs such as Miami Scope, Aqua Art and Affordable Art Fair. This is Esposito’s first exhibition in Minneapolis.
