Sushi Bar Gallery is excited to present New Objects by Amy Giovanna Rinaldi.

 

To talk about a body of work in relation to Rinaldi’s new work is to talk about the body that created them: what and where this body is, what it wants, what it cares about. Rinaldi’s objects reconfigure the material substances bodies produce—hair, spit, semen, blood—onto their own formally and materially reconfigured surfaces as qualities, disconnected from the organs that originally produced them. Musculature comes into play as presentation, in the surfaces’ various folds and edges, the sense of density and levitation, the stretched containment and exposure of the materials in relation to their armatures.

 

These are objects that have the capacity for memory. Rather than act as a nostalgic symbol or the index of an experience or action, the works embody a kind of repetitive remembering through process: manipulate a found armature into a desired shape; twine-wrap the armature until the shape has been obscured but not the desire; paint the twine until there is no longer “paint” nor “twine,” but the surface palpability of strings, flyaways, and color; respond to all of this with a different desired material-shape and repeat. The material reality of each step is the predominant physical frame for the next, but because the surfaces are complicated and often unwieldy, their meetings are generally not placid. They must come to terms with each other. The completed objects that emerge from these processes end up with psychologies: a history of behavioral patterns; a consciousness toward their own surfaces and forms; origin myths; defense mechanisms; desires for growth through a questioning and feeling-through of what just happened.

 

Can memories of feelings be images? And if our remembered feelings are also in the world, have tactile components, what kind of visual language would we need to translate these accurately? Rinaldi’s works make the case for a kind of imaging through an analogy with the evocative detail: not the look or sounds of sex but a particular feeling of tacky-sweat and resistance against clavicles; not the reflection of a body but how it feels powerful or weak, under what conditions, in what clothes. (In a sense, the work’s logic of representation is closest to an experience of déjà vu. The present which appears to us as belonging to the past uncannily and irrevocably, without reason or geography.)

Because they are very felt and refuse to disclose themselves immediately, Rinaldi’s works are able to maintain an emotional openness toward the very transformations they undergo. The objects ask us to take them as they appear and then to stay with them, to root out what burden, enduring desire, which flash of pain or tenderness allowed them to become visual, communicative.

 

Text by Gaby Collins-Fernandez

 

Amy Giovanna Rinaldi is a visual artist born and raised in California. She received her BA in Studio Art from Oberlin College in 2009 and her MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Yale University in 2012.  She has exhibited in California, New York, New Haven, Detroit, Ohio, Philadelphia and Japan. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.