It's been nine months since artist Mary DiBiasio took leave of our humble Miltown for an obscure little burg called New York City. During that time, she's made a dramatic shift from the very physical, room-consuming medium of printmaking--some of those presses are huge, kids!--to the more small-space friendly medium of digital imaging. This change of artistic agent, however, has not diminished her copious flow of creativity in any way, shape or form. In fact, she's so near to bursting her braincase with artsy ideas, it was all I could do to keep pace with her as we chatted on the phone some two weeks back.
For those unfamiliar with DiBiasio's life and talent, we offer a brief rundown. Born and raised in Chicago, IL, she soon found her way north, obtaining her BFA at Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design (MIAD) and teaching at various educational levels. While still a young artisan, she was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis (RA), a chronic and progressively debilitating disease effecting the joints. Those of us well acquainted with RA never underestimate its painful cruelty, and for a printmaker--or anyone whose work demands physicality--it is a brutal blow indeed to receive such news.
But DiBiasio is not an ailment, she is an artist. She cannot deny her innate need for creative exploration nor halt the conceptual flood. Art is idea and, boy howdy, has she got plenty of that!
Her journey into digital has resulted in some truly bold yet oddly quiet images, collectively entitled The Still Life Series. Combining shots of windows, tables, chairs, and everyday objects, the manipulated images of domestic space speak to the specificity of each home and those who inhabit it. For me, the shots looking out through the widows also tell of the particular and sometimes peculiar view we have of the world based on our distinctive location.
In describing the work--which, btw, showed last month as projected images at The Green Gallery West--DiBiasio stated:
"I've always been interested in people living next to each other and with each other and the temporal nature of certain stability such as a home... the work was about change, about how my loved one's lives have changed in a year, the way my mother's apartment never really changes, the way we move from one place to another. It was also a meditation I think, for me as I was making them, on how people create their own little homes."
She went further, telling me that some of her friends who had been together when she took these images have separated, hence, they are a documentation of coexistence that no longer exists. Ya can't get more temporal than that, can ya?
DiBiasio is thinking about cobbling together a book of her Still Life Series, and I wish to heartily encourage her in pursuit of that endeavor. Frankly, I think any artsy publisher would be loony not to jump on it posthaste. She's also playing around with the notion of creating images on commission, whereby folks would hire her to document their domiciles, noting the changes that occur over time. Another sweet idea!
In addition to digital image making, DiBiasio is finding that ideas can spring from anywhere, even from places you'd least expect, like her day job at Rockefeller Center's Anthropologie--hey, girl's gotta eat, don't she? Course she does. Though I'm not at liberty to divulge the details as the project is still in its development stages, let's just say it's storytelling through the arrangement and display of objects and/or merchandise. Ooh, got ya all aquiver with that one, didn't we?
Link (Thanks, Mary!)
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