COLOMBIAN EXPEDITION PART 1 : POMOLOGY OPENING RECEPTION: JAN / 15 / 2011 from 7-9 PM

EyeLevel BQE is celebrating new beginnings with the work of Aurora Pellizzi.

Since early November 2010, artist Aurora Pellizzi has been in Bogotá, Colombia. POMOLOGY is a demonstration of her process of translation, assimilation, appropriation, and adaptation of a new environment and culture. As a metaphor for this experience she mimics the tradition and history of botanical expeditions into the equatorial New World of the early Spanish explorers of the 17th and 18th centuries in their ‘discovery’, categorization, and interpretation of ‘exotic’ plants and fruit. As with the early explorers, unfamiliar objects are re-classified and re-arranged in an attempt to comprehend and appropriate them, to incorporate them into a meaningful aesthetic world and experience. For the purposes of this exhibition, the artist has narrowed her subject to that of tropical fruit. She dissects, reproduces, and re-interprets them, creating new images of things unfamiliar. The subjects are not discovered, but invented. In the process of interpretation and representation, the imagination creates its own image and meaning, expressed in the artist’s own language of assimilation.

ABOUT AURORA PELLIZZI WEB ADDRESS http://aurorapellizzi.com/

BLOG http://thebetterdaysblog.blogspot.com/

I was born in Mexico City, and raised between New York City and the tropical town of Cuernavaca in Central Mexico. My parents however are Italian and American in origin and are both anthropologists. I grew up following the craft traditions of Central and Southern México: amate painting, silver-smithing, and textile weaving. In 2005 I had the opportunity to produce a line of clothing in the Tachi Castillo ‘Taller’. Since then I have maintained an ongoing collaboration with the seamstresses from the ‘Taller’. I completed my education at the Cooper Union School of Art in February 2010 where I studied painting, video, and sculpture after receiving a B.A. in Art History (Fine Arts) from NYU in 2005. I’ve complemented these studies with courses in pattern-making, sewing, and jewelry-making at FIT.