Jan 112013
 

Gina Occhiogrosso

Every writer/artist knows that you throw away more than you finish, that the material thrown away is often very good but only a step along the way to a larger vision, or it doesn’t quite fit in the organic structure of the finished product. Gina Occhiogrosso has turned her steps along the way into a larger proliferating work called, with charming irony, the Someday Project. The steps along the way thus become art and the immense collection of drawings, sketches, cartoons and paintings has become a protean mega-project that, on exhibit, covers walls and rooms with a kind of madcap informality. Lovely the way the pictures in the photo below climb up the wall and slop over onto the ceiling. No frames, no hanging self-important masterworks, just paper tacked to the wall, filling the wall, creating a meta-image, a mirror of, yes, the artist’s mind.

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The above image is from a complete installation of a project titled Someday. The whole project began in 2007, and is now at around 500 drawings. Each drawing is 8.5 x 11 inches. The drawings began on cheap copy paper paper, but as people visited my studio, they convinced me to treat the drawings with a little more importance and use better paper such as watercolor paper, bristol, or Yupo (polyurethane). Someday is only part of what I do as an artist, but this project helps me work things out when I simply need to move the larger work forward, or when I need to work something out, personally. Themes include, but are not limited to, feminism, the economy, the fragile landscape, and relationships. Some works are cartoony, some are pure experiments in abstraction. This particular slide shows a specific exhibition at The Arts Center of the Capital Region, where I sat in the gallery and worked a few hours each week for the run of the show.
—Gina Occhiogrosso

  Gina Occhiogrosso art

Gina Occhiogrosso art

Gina Occhiogrosso art

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Gina Occhiogrosso art

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Gina Occhiogrosso art

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—Gina Occhiogrosso

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Gina Occhiogrosso’s national exhibition experience includes group shows at Brenda Taylor Gallery and Lana Santorelli Gallery in NYC, MIA Miami International Airport Gallery, Lehman College Art Gallery, Bronx, NY. She was recently featured in a three-person show titled Flux at The Arts Center of the Capital Region in Troy, NY. She has had several one-person shows at such places as Nicole Fiacco Gallery, Hudson, NY, Saratoga Arts Council Art Gallery, Saratoga Springs, NY, Amrose Sable Gallery, Albany, NY, Lake George Project for the Arts, and Yates Gallery at Siena College. Her work may be viewed in the Pierogi Flat Files, in Brooklyn, NY, and through registries such as The Drawing Center and Nurture Art. In 2010 she was included in the project, The Other End of the Line, a project developed by artist Francis Cape and created for The High Line in Chelsea, NY. Her video was included in a mobile home trailer (stationed at the beginning of the High Line at Gansevoort Plaza), which contained an exhibition of work by numerous artists and was curated by Ian Berry, curator for The Tang Teaching Museum, Skidmore College.

  3 Responses to “Someday Project: Drawings/Paintings — Gina Occhiogrosso”

  1. I wish I could see this fanciful and intriguing artwork in person.

  2. The concept behind this body of work is so awesome! I wish writers could take all the best cuts and edits and lost lines of poetry and make something like “Someday.” But I think this idea is somehow meant for visual art. I love the diversity of the images – there’s beauty and horror and incredible flowing lines. I like the white/empty spaces too, it gives each image a bit of isolation. I love your work, the idea and the way you express it. I wish I could see it in person too!

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