This exhibition brings together a series of interrelated works that draw on walking, gathering, and collecting as person- al practices of materiality and history. Walking is explored as a situated relational practice that interweaves multiple specific landscapes that hold personal and semiotic meaning across otherwise culturally disparate geo-political places.
Capaldi frequently works serially, expanding upon print media and photo-based processes. New works in this exhibition explore image-based materials utilizing pigment handmade from oak galls gathered around Walden Pond; rock formations collected on daily walks to her grandfather’s village in Italy; and reflections on the massive London Plane trees in her changing Brooklyn neighborhood. A unifying theme of time and transformation emerges through found materialities, asking the viewer to examine their own place within ever-shifting, highly sensitive ecosystems. These works offer an immersive connection to landscape, while questioning the symbolic narrative of Walden Pond, the place of migration and identity, and hinting at the unsettling aspects of contemporary ecological transformation.
Her conceptually-driven works explore themes of nature to challenge normalized perceptions of the environment and question the cultural overlay placed upon the natural world. Blending a poetic sensibility with a re- search-based approach and minimalist aesthetic, her works bridge the gap between sublime beauty and the abject and mundane, collectively weaving a multilayered dialogue.
PATTI CAPALDI, born in Providence, RI, lives and works in Ithaca and Brooklyn, NY. Working at the intersection of photo-based imagery and print-media, her practice includes multiples, installation, and artists’ books. Her work has been shown nationally and internationally including the Bernard Toale Gallery, Boston, Nylon Gallery, London, Metaphor Contemporary, Brooklyn, The University of RI, The Photographic Resource Center, Boston, CEPA Gallery, Buffalo, the Johnson Art Museum, Ithaca, Michigan State University, Syracuse University and Cazenovia College, among others. Work is instated in the flat-file viewing program at Pierogi Gallery, NYC and Caroll & Sons Gallery, Boston. Capaldi is a recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship and the Lily Auchincloss Foundation Award (works on paper/multiples/artists books) a Gottlieb Foundation Grant, and a Rauschenberg Change Grant.
She has been awarded residencies from the MacDowell Colony, the Millay Foundation, the Banff Center for the Arts, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, AIR Program, Vienna, Austria, the Jentel Foundation, the Santa Fe Art Institute, Constance Saltonstall Foundation, the Oberpfalzer Kunstlerhaus in Germany and SLAK AIR program, the Netherlands. Capaldi received her MFA from the Massachusetts College of Art & Design and her BFA from Minneapolis College of Art & Design. She is an associate professor of art at Ithaca College, Ithaca, New York. In January she will hold a solo exhibition at the Handwerker Gallery, Ithaca College, and in March work will be included at the Mana Foundation, Jersey City, NJ in conjunction with the Pierogi Gallery, Brooklyn.
Her work is rooted in the history and processes of photo-based imagery and continually draws from the thrust and mutability of the photographic image while exploring a range of analog and digital print processes. Often working from sourced archived images or photos she takes herself, the work explores contexts that destabilize the image and explores visual vagaries that question where meaning resides. Her work often explores systems of meaning that have been impressed upon nature throughout eras of colonialism and globalization. More specifically, common perceptions and representations of nature being “neutral,” “passive” and “decorative” are starting points for much of her projects.
