Priscilla Fusco
Priscilla Fusco “Chase Bank,” 2021, stoneware and mason stain, 15 x 16 in (38.1 x 40.6 cm)
Priscilla Fusco: ‘Dark Pool’
Nov 7-Dec 12, 2021
Opening reception: Sun, Nov 7, 1-4pm
Hours: by appointment
Directions: Norte Maar, 88 Pine Street, Cypress Hills, Brooklyn
J/Z Train to Brooklyn, Crescent Street Stop
In accordance with the New York City mandate, all visitors age 12 and older must show proof that they have received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine to enter the gallery. Persons in gallery limited to 5. Outdoor seating available.
Norte Maar is please to announce a solo exhibition of new works by Priscilla Fusco in a show titled “Dark Pool.”
Known for her mixing of mythology within odd sculptural objectness, in this recent work Fusco indulges in biology while referencing the underbelly of shady financial trading. The exhibition explores two bodies of work in clay: wall mounted two-dimensional pieces the artist calls “tablets” and free-standing three-dimensional works the artist calls “commodities.”
“Tablets” mix biological elements like bones, mushrooms, and roe, with contemporary symbols such as corporate logos and typesets of historical significance like the German Schwabacherfont, which was banned by the Nazis for being too “Jewish,” or the Roman typeface from antiquity. These “Tablets,” rectilinear in shape, barely contain the automatic free-forming compositions are accentuated by the surreal.
“Commodities,” is an ongoing series involving the form of teeth converted into jewelry, curtains and tableware. Borrowing from the jaws of animals ranging from the hippopotamus to the shark, each fabricated tooth is unique. Understanding that first evolutionary line of defense in predatory survival is the bite, the artist presents these forms for reliquary purposes—to be venerated in the manner of a Catholic icon.
In both these bodies of work, Fusco captures several historical craft techniques for clay, including agate / marbling, carving and relief. These techniques play wonderfully at the hands of an artist that is known for her embrace of the macabre and mysterious.
At its most fundamental level, I see life as a busy, baroque mess of interactions – the product of eons of collisions of molecules into unique organisms. I want my work to respect and reflect this messy ongoing process of natural selection, of which we are a part, as well as its fragility.
Every piece of mine should remind the viewer that we are part of a natural world that is in peril. At the same time, I am much more interested in arriving at a synthesis between humans and other organisms than highlighting our material excesses. Nests, tunnels, scents and songs provide me with blueprints of animal intelligence, guided by hidden rules. I seek to confront the human viewer with a non-human persona of equal standing, with its own subjectivity, or umwelt.
We gentrify the living and non-living entities outside of us, despite being their product: not only should we find ourselves in them, they also need to be pulled out of us. I am especially drawn to clay, which avoids hierarchies of art-making and traverses all cultures, although I have also worked with wire, stone, wood and wasp-nest paper.
— Priscilla Fusco
Priscilla Fusco combines the decorative craft of ceramics, and its various histories, with contemporary news, fashion and surrealism. She has shown at Proto Gomez, Paradice Palase, Tappeto Volante, Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Norte Maar’s Counterpointe series, Underdonk, and others. She lives and works in Brooklyn. She holds a BA in English from Barnard College and an MFA from Hunter University.
Priscilla Fusco, Untitled (Tablet), 2021, Stoneware and mason stain, 13 x 11 1/4 in (33 x 28.6 cm)
