Elizabeth D’Agostino: Journals From the Silk Current
By Fred Camper
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The backdrop for From the Scarlet Curio Series is a large piece of silk dyed red and gold with roses stamped or drawn on it in black, stretching from the floor almost to the ceiling. Before it on the left hangs a line of curious objects, odd dark red bell shapes D’Agostino made by dipping Styrofoam pyramids in wax; around their bottoms are roses in relief. Too eccentric to have been purchased, they nevertheless suggest decorative baubles. To the right a huge column of red fabric hangs from the ceiling, sprawling in folds on the floor like a dress that’s too long. But the key element seems to be a grid of small cast-wax red roses on the floor that extends into the viewer’s space. The use of both floor and wall creates a kind of theater: the floor becomes a stage, the hanging silk a backdrop, and the objects in front of it are like actors in a wordless drama.
Now living in Florida, D’Agostino was born in 1972 in Oakville, Ontario, to Italian immigrant parents. She felt a bit of an outsider as a child: her parents spoke mostly English at home, but “mixed up with Italian words,” and she says she brought “these huge sandwiches with crusty bread” to school when all the other kids had peanut butter and jelly. But perhaps most significant, her parents’ home was different, with “museum rooms, rooms that you don’t enter.” A sitting room upstairs with “white upholstery, scroll-like chairs, was used only on special occasions like the engagement of one of the children.” There were two kitchens, a downstairs one for cooking and an upstairs one that was never used, “where all was spotless and beautiful–it had silverware and china, all the things that were handed down.”
Like D’Agostino, Stutts creates works that have some of the qualities of narrative. The sculptures in this show had their beginning when she was living in a new neighborhood after the breakup and began collecting junk from the street. She connects her choice of materials to an interest in “the down-and-out”: the process of watching them and collecting is inscribed in these pieces. Even a relatively abstract untitled work made up of a box with three compartments can be seen as the diary of a collector: arranged like frames in a film, the three compartments contain wood or rusted metal (and two include wool), as if to say “These are the items I found and organized.”
