Santina Amato: Convulsive Beauty

“Beauty will be convulsive or not at all … Convulsive beauty will be veiled-erotic, fixed-explosive, magic-circumstantial or not at all.” 

— André Breton

 

The exhibition title Convulsive Beauty derives from the irrational and contradictory concept that André Breton introduced in his books Nadja (1928) and Mad Love (1937). It includes abstract works — photographs, ceramics, and new digital prints — that touch upon the notion of the psychosexual body as a living organism and a site of desire. The work has an uncanny sensibility: portraits show women in familiar domestic settings covered mysteriously in amorphous, oozing piles of dough that approximate their weight; biomorphic white ceramic vessels with shiny, screaming-red interiors suggest fleshy bodily orifices. The latest work, which has never been exhibited before, is made from digital line drawings that Amato populates with film stills from her Amateur Porn series. She then manipulates the resulting contorted abstractions that intertwine like body parts. While diverse in medium and appearance, these works share a common vocabulary of colors and biomorphic shapes that simultaneously allude to the interior and exterior states of the body.

 

Amato was born in Australia to Italian immigrants and has lived and worked in the USA since 2010. She is interested in the physical nature of materials that relate to the domestic environment, such as bread dough, bedsheets, fresh produce, as well as the labor processes used when working with these materials. She often uses bread dough in unexpected ways. For Amato, the life cycle of dough is a powerful metaphor for exploring the ideas of birth and decay, bodily processes, sexuality, and the erotic.

 

Curated by Lisa Freiman, Ph.D