Under The Same Roof

by

Andrea Anastasio

Preview: 8 June, 7pm onwards

GALLERYSKE, Bangalore is proud to present, Under The Same Roof, recent works by Andrea Anastasio. On display from 9 June to 13 July 2008, this will be Andrea's debut solo with GALLERYSKE.

Under the Same Roof comprises sculptures and images that are placed within the gallery space to construct a 'habitat' where the natural and the artificial, the organic and the manmade merge into one dynamic.

Except for the work titled, The Hours, 2007, that belongs to a former body of works resulting from a simple alteration of function in objects from daily life, and for a set of images shot between 2004 and 2007, all other works involve the repetitive processes of knitting, weaving, and tying using either synthetic materials that imitate nature or natural materials that have been manually crafted.

The manual repetitiveness of basic craft techniques is crucial to Anastasio's works. From the beginning of his artistic practice, he has been interested in investigating the real and the psychological time implicit in the process of making a work and in the intermediary stages that exist between the initial conception and the final realization of the piece. The impersonal and playful quality of these techniques perfectly matches the compositional methodology that is at the center of the artist's concern. This allows both the pre-conceived and the accidental to be part of the process, as if the calculated and the unexpected were the warp and the weft by which the artist weaves his works. These find their values in the simple manual act of making them, an act which is in turn divested of usual utilitarian finalities. In the process of making these objects, the artist re-engages with the dimension of suspended time inherent to the act of play, and a "knowing through the hands".

Fishing nets, hunting nets, cages and textiles are recurrent leitmotifs in Anastasio's vocabulary. Whether it is mathematical grids, the pixel structure of digital images, town planning, the latitudes and longitudes that map the globe, the grid is used extensively to define and to control. Above and beyond the grid also brings to mind cages/traps and thus become metaphors of colonization and other such complex associations.

These objects are perfectly suited to approach issues of domesticity and wilderness, sedentariness and nomadism, nature and culture and the way our perception of reality is affected by these categories.

While the works often address issues of a certain gravity and are informed by compositional modalities and conceptual approaches of minimalism and Arte Povera, the humor in the works, particularly that afforded by artificial materials that imitate nature, transforms the rigid geometry of grids and nets into more unpredictable visual short circuits. Under the Same Roof addresses many of the polarities by which we articulate knowledge, referring also to the manmade split between body and mind, the intellectual and the sensorial.

The titles of the works often define the 'victims' as much as they do the 'traps'. Gold Fish comprises a fishing net made out of glittering golden fabric. This modular work is suspended to form a space within a space, a geometrical dimension through which the viewer walks to enter the gallery. The piece functions not only as a metaphor for domestic walls and/or membranes meant to differentiate the uncontrolled from the controlled, the domestic from the urban, but also as the borderline between the banality of everyday things and materials and their subsequent transformation into art-works. Catwalk and Zen Walk are two sculptures made out of floor ceramic tiles (another example of a grid that defines space) and fake cat fur that interlace the domestic and the wild. Celestial, which is suspended from the ceiling consists of peacock feathers woven into grids to form a birdcage. A wooden chair 'trapped' in a leopard net is a work titled, In Between.

About the artist:

Andrea Anastasio is a cosmopolitan transcultural soul and artist. Born in Rome, Anastasio traveled to India at age 18. Now 29 years later, 15 of which he spent in India, he has developed a deep and layered knowledge of art, religious studies, music, theater and philosophy. Anastasio has an MA degree in philosophy from the University of Venice, Italy.

Between 1989 and 2002, Anastasio worked on designing objects for everyday, domestic use that employed materials originally intended for specialized purposes like high-tech industrial outputs and/or construction. He also engages with fabrics and textiles to compose soft three-dimensional sculptural installations. He has designed lamps for Artemide, pieces of furniture, tableware, glass objects and office accessories for Sawaya & Moroni, Danese and Memphis. In 2002 he branched away from working as a professional designer to concentrate on his art practice. In 2005 he was Artist-in-Residence at Isabella Stewart Gardener Museum in Boston, USA.