Girlish Fears and Memories

Bianca d'Amico convinces at CalArt with a huge and wonderful oeuvre

Bianca D'Amico is a real newness, although as a student at the California Institute of the Arts very fresh on the arts, she is quite a star already. She has produced a huge oeuvre with fine and strict contours. We found her via UBER and UBER Blogger Andrew, who showed himself very impressed by one of her video installations - a floor projection - she showed at CalArt in April 2007. Her objects, assemblages, installations, videoworks, projection-installations can be seen at her own website www.biancadamicoart.com

We srcubbed the website. Now results.

At first: Coloured stones. You'll think of childish hobbies and house-wives working in a garden. But d'Amico refines such common techniques of garden culture and puts some special stones, some glitter fun and other fragile little things in it. You'll imagine young girls then. Consequently, a diaprojection shows young girls in a kind of fairy tales scenery, but the Alice-landscape has changed from the common nature of wood, grass and rabbits to mothers, bodies and stone-like formed breasts and bellies. It's a kind of new alice horror of changing, alluding to the universe of deformation and injustice Alice grows into in the story.

The subject of distortion Blogger Andrew found sensibly in her work, is a red line throughout the whole. But nevertheless most of her artwork is funny and "nice", fragile and light, colourful, imaginative a.s.o. what you suspect a girl's fantasy to be full of. Some of her paintings - unfortunately they are all untitled and without year etc. - combine a kind of lighty watercolour and drawing structure to a kind of imaginative landscape, alluding to organic forms of the body, the liver, the uterus a.s.o. All of them have a formal touch, too, and they are of course abstract, non-figurative art. The body-formed formalism swaps to funny photos like a girl making a "bridge" and another one playing with a gymnastic-ring while wearing a kind of "Bee Maya" costume. They are all looking like academy of arts girls, their trousers or costumes full of paint.

Other "paintings" are collages of thousand pieces of small, well formed, pastel coloured paper scraps. The forms are abstract, a little bit organic as in other paintings of d'Amico, a little bit surreal so that you may be allowed to think of Gorky. But it's of course far away from any historical style. It's not even painted, as such. The paper scraps are well known from their usual use at parties, especially weddings, when they are thrown around everywhere and especially the two happy ones are covered by it. D'Amico's scraps build new forms, individual forms, that transform this simple usage into a kind of preformation. I have to think of the wedding-flowers that are thrown into the mass to make a fate determined judgement about who has to become the next bride. The scrapforms are in this way like forms of hot lead put into water at new year's day (another party usually using paper scraps). As such they become symbols of preformation, in a way strange signs of having to do something you not even know what to be.

This part of work is interesting because the quite young artist plays the role of even younger girls and makes herself a speaker of their unconscious fears.

This is the very special quality of her great objects of wood, clothes, litter, textiles.They are quite concrete and figurative, showing animal oder human-like figures, in general playing anything or kept busy with entertainment. They are again like figures you create for fun while lying in the sun at the beach or anything like this. If you compare them with other kinds of toy, these are positive feminist work: They breath being made by a kind of chance, with some preformed figures in it, but being beautiful and functional as industrial toys - you'll have to put your finger on this now, because to identify with toys shouldn't be called feminist, but if you talk about the reality of young girls you'll have to consider it. And the special kind of functionality, by the way, is not for anything else but the girlfriends these situative toys let you imagine as creators.

Experiences for their older sisters are subject of the work, Bianca d'Amico was recognized for in quite a lot of magazines reporting about CalArt. It's perhaps, a pity. Even we, although "handicapped" with a special feminist interest, saw her work first because we've read a report of Andrew, the UBER Blogger about her Video-Floorinstallation. The "in a way pornographic" style of this piece got the most awareness, while especially Andrew judged other works as 'feminism as usual'.

Well, we love it and especially feminism as usual, at first because of its impressionist caracter (read more about this at www.arts-on.com, Archives, edition of June), its "Virgulisme". But secondly, it is just one distorting piece of a huge series of sexual-distortion-fun d'Amico presented at CalArt. These are: photographies of herself and propably her girl-friends, some of them stills of a performance. They are quite "dirty", showing them always with some ugly fluids on the face. Others make fun of pornography and the duplicative effect of its prohibition.Strange fluids are subject again in assemblages as the two legs of a human sized doll, out of which long threads are flowing. Other assemblages, again more reminiscent of sun, beach and early youth, show again coloured threads formed into nets.

Altogether, its a kind of horizont, Bianca d'Amico's art is a powerful and huge prospect of feminity with its fun and fears, its strangeness and social preformations. We hope it will go on like that.

Dr. Ulrike Ritter

The artist's website: Bianca d'Amico Art