GINA OCCHIOGROSSO/ INFORMATION
When most people would rather forget their childhood, I mine it as a valuable resource that helps me untangle the past and move an audience to reflect on their own. In addition to finding inspiration from my own history, I search for clues in society and human behavior. In my work, fairy tales, dollhouses or birthday cakes are some of the subjects that address topics such as gender roles, aging, and the fragile family tree. Often I question popular archetypes and transform them by reacting to the subject in a subversive manner, and I do this in the form of revising existing text, or image. There is a level of anxiety, worry, longing, and failure embedded in these reoccurring themes, however there is an attempt to use humor and poetry as devices to reframe them. The results can be political commentary, sarcasm, hopefulness, or exaggeration.
typically work on several series at once. The work can be abstract, symbolic, or representational, and is conceptually based. I work primarily in painting and drawing, however I have been known to use whatever medium to express what I need to say, such as video/performance, sculpture, embroidery, installation, printmaking, or photography.
During one of my mining expeditions, I was exploring my mother’s basement and I came across my dollhouse, the one my father built me upon his departure from our family. Years later, I now see the significance of this house and have created a 3 video installation within the dollhouse itself. One film is of me dragging(with full harness) the dollhouse, through a picturesque fairy tale landscape; another is footage of me repeatedly pulling the dollhouse around my mother’s house, cut with footage of an actual house being moved; and lastly, is a film of me violently cutting the dollhouse up until it is completely destroyed. The tiny video screens run in three of 8 decorated rooms, complete with lighting. The dollhouse itself is a “Frankenstein” house fastened back together precariously with mending staples. Its fragile nature mirrors the continued repair of my mother’s 100 year old farmhouse and to the repair of my memories. It expresses a universal theme about the burden of a perfect dream of home.
Work develops through a confluence of many events, another such case was witnessing the adolescent development of my niece Lauren, me getting older with no husband or children, and starting to feel out of place where I was always comfortable. I began to think about the books that were given to me at her age, the stories I read about the prince coming to rescue the princess. I wanted my niece to be a strong independent individual able to make her own decisions without a timeline. One day, I came into my classroom and there was a Cinderella sticker on the Artbin case of an 18 year old art student. Why were these stories so popular, and why was I so skeptical? So I began to reread the stories. Fairy tales assume a sort of ending that we are programmed to hope for and makes the princess out to be someone weak, who is always working hard to clean and be beautiful. Upon inspection of these narratives, I began to decipher a new story by looking for clues and recoding the words and repainting the images. Letters are only omitted and are never added; all the text is intact and has only been painted out. Now they have more dubious outcomes of comedy, sex, and violence.
One ongoing series is called Someday, and it is currently up to about 200 drawings in total. Each is vertical in format and on 11 x 8.5 inch paper. For over two decades I have used cheap copy paper to do fast immediate drawings. These have always allowed me to transition though work, purging ideas with less precious results. For the past year, I have been tracking these drawings with the final result of showing them in a complete installation. The drawings(now at 200) are goofy, emotional, abstract, realistic, minimal, maximal, textured, but together make connections to create an autobiographical landscape.
EDUCATION
