© 2009 Gina Occhiogrosso

Dream a little dream; Artists explore subconscious in 'Conceits'
By Doug Gruse
dgruse@poststar.com
Published: Tuesday, November 11, 2008

SARATOGA SPRINGS — Dreams convey our happily-ever-after wishes and our worst nightmares.

In "Conceits of Idle Hours," the current exhibit at the Arts Center Gallery, the brightest and darkest moments of the subconscious mind collide.

In the show, which features a diverse sampling of pieces by Gina Occhiogrosso of Troy and Brooklyn-based artist Katherine McDowell Patterson, delicate butterflies float on velvet, animals take on hybrid forms reminiscent of the work of Dr. Moreau, Sleeping Beauty gets pharmaceutical enhancement and a dollhouse becomes a video monitor. Famed psychoanalyst Carl Jung would have had a field day. Visions of snake-birds "I would describe my work as being kind of dream inspired," McDowell Patterson said. During sleep, the artist envisioned crosses of animals that could never exist in nature. A snake's head adds a dangerous element to a bird's body. A hissing cat face rests atop a snake, and an owl-cat perches on a branch. The graphite on paper work is stark and detailed. "I have a lot of dreams of snakes," McDowell Patterson said. Although she admits to having an aversion to the reptiles, she also finds them fascinating. "I wouldn't say I am a fan. I find them a really potent symbol. I have been enamored of them since I was young in a horrified way," she said. McDowell Patterson has studied the creatures closely. She used to work primarily as a photographer, and her journalistic eye shines through in the creatures' scales and piercing eyes. "They don't have an eyelid, which makes them seem very alien," she said Combining a snake with a less-threatening creature like a cat or a bird adds a whole new level of intrigue, according to the artist. "When combined, there's a kind of ferocity it brings to those otherwise amiable animals. It gives them added power," she said. McDowell Patterson's photographic sensibility comes through in pieces that resemble aerial snapshots. She sees the work as a transition between her photography and her drawing. "I travel a lot for my work, and I always get a window seat I think because I have a fascination with birds and flight," she said. "I take rolls of film from my seat on an airplane. I like the sense of levitation and the difference that you can have from a certain altitude." The artist's fascination with flight is obvious in "Swarm," a painting on velvet that depicts the delicacy of butterflies in the air. The velvet paintings in the show have a refined quality that transcends the Elvis and Last Supper kitsch often found at garage sales and flea markets. McDowell Patterson, who now works professionally as a costume designer, perfected the technique over time."I love color. I've always liked working with fabrics and color. I do that in my painting by using dyeing techniques with applied painting techniques," she said. Mastering the process can be tricky. "Dyeing is very hard to control. The dyes are very unpredictable. I make a lot of mistakes in the paintings, and a lot of the successes are happy accidents," she said. The fabric adds its own quality to the pieces, according to the artist. "The velvet is almost like a sponge. It has some depth to it. With the sky paintings, it creates a luminous effect," she said. McDowell Patterson's pieces in "Conceits of Idle Hours" show the evolution of her recent work. "I made the transition to drawing when I came upon a wall in my photographic work where I couldn't represent the imagination well enough," she said.

Slicing the dollhouse Gina Occhiogrosso still remembers the emotional turmoil she felt when her parents divorced. She was in the sixth grade at the time, and she felt like her house was being torn apart. Her father, perhaps to make amends, offered to build her a dollhouse as a gift."I designed it. I wanted it to look like our house in Niskayuna," Occhiogrosso said. "He came to visit, and he drove it up in a van to deliver the thing. We were stunned by the scale of it." The shrunken version of her family home was enormous by dollhouse standards -- big enough to fit several Barbie Dream Houses inside.Occhiogrosso became impassioned about furnishing the house. "I wanted to simulate this Colonial period house. I felt like I got an educational history through that dollhouse," she said. The work also allowed Occhiogrosso to take control of something in her life at a time when she felt somewhat lost. Years later, an adult Occhiogrosso has turned her former escapist hobby into art. Her childhood dreams get deconstructed in the piece "Homework.""I thought I could do something with this -- my father destroying our home life and then bringing me a dollhouse. It's ironic," Occhiogrosso said.The artist cut up the dollhouse and added video components to its interior."I wanted to take this thing through this whole other set of revisions," she said.The dreamlike elements of favorite childhood stories also get reconstructed in Occhiogrosso's art."I did a revised fairy tale series," she said. "I revised them through observing these hidden narratives I could pull out of the stories." Reflecting on her childhood, Occhiogrosso began to question some of the morals of common tales like "Cinderella" and "Sleeping Beauty." "When you are exposed to a lot of that sort of stuff, when you look for a partner, you don't kind of dig any deeper," she said. "You look for this strange simulation of something that doesn't exist -- and that's really dangerous." The myths also help perpetuate body issues for young women, according to Occhiogrosso."You spend your life trying to live up to this Cinderella type. Most of the characters are blond with this perfect body type. For someone like myself, who went through a hard adolescence, it can set you up for failure," she said.So in Occhiogrosso's version of "Sleeping Beuty," the princess finds slumber with some pharmaceutical aid."I try to put a spin on things," the artist said. "I do like that I have a sense of humor. I am being a little ridiculous in the way I restructure them." Occhiogrosso included a pink neon light that spells the word "Someday" with her eclectic installation."It's a glowing beacon," she said. "If you keep looking for that perfection, you are never going to enjoy the present."

Metroland Magazine, Albany, NY, December 13, 2007

I Like I Like I Like

 By Nadine Wasserman

Someday: Drawings by Gina Occhiogrosso

Amrose Sable Gallery, through Jan. 27

Someday is an optimistic word. “Someday,” as opposed to “perhaps” or “never,” indicates that at an indefinite future time something will certainly happen. Picture that same word in the rosy glow of pink neon. Perfect for this time of year, Gina Occhiogrosso’s neon sign Someday dangles in the shop window of the gallery and beckons us inside. Like the little match girl, we stand out in the cold staring at the bright, optimistic light, dreaming of love, warmth, and joy.

Despite her rose-colored reference, Occhiogrosso is no Pollyanna. Her optimism emerges as an antidote to her inner struggle with life’s everyday failures and rejections. She earnestly attempts to convert her melancholy into something positive, and she does so with a dollop of humor. Those familiar with her work will remember her cross-stitch drawings and embroidery using the phrase “I Try” and her manipulations of Disneyfied fairy tales. In this exhibition, Occhiogrosso continues her quest for perfection with the phrase “I’m ok.” She uses repetitive phrases like a mantra as a way to control her obsessive thoughts. While she strives for calm and healing, she claims that her phrases are part mantra, part hysteria. Instead of serenity, the making of her work often elicits more anxiety. Like a repetitive stress injury, the phrases sometimes burn into her consciousness, making it hard to relax. Even so, she returns to the studio and strives for what remains elusive: fortune, pleasure, true love, a masterpiece. Her personal struggles here become public spectacle and her vulnerabilities are exposed.

Occhiogrosso’s graphite-and-colored-pencil drawings here come in two sizes and depict lace doilies and cross-stitch patterns. The three largest works appear like mandalas. They each magnify a different doily, turning what otherwise would seem precious and delicate into something iconic. Ordinarily, doilies are placed underneath more important objects. But when Occhiogrosso looks at them, she thinks about who made them and the craft, attention, focus, and effort it took. The best of the three larger drawings is almost completely frayed and unraveled. It is a reflection of the wear and tear of everyday life. Like Dickens’ Miss Haversham, it glories in its own defeat, wearing its scars like a badge of honor.

In this particular show, Occhiogrosso focuses on drawing as a way to transition back to painting. Drawing helps her work through ideas, images, and space. And there is an intimacy to making a drawing that is not the same in painting. The artist Matthew Ritchie, in a 2005 interview in the PBS series Art:21, explained that “a painting becomes a very static fixed thing, but a drawing, you can make it three- dimensional, you can make it flat, you can turn it into a sphere, you can just keep pushing it, and pushing it, and pushing it, because all it is is information, it’s just a bunch of marks.” Occhiogrosso also pushes her drawings. Some are symmetrical, others off kilter; some are black-and-white, others in color; some flat, others sculptural. On one wall of the gallery she has placed 133 small works in adjoining rows. She uses ordinary 8 1/2 x 11 paper. These small drawings reflect her usual themes but in a way that is more playful. Often made in one sitting, they are more gestural and experimental and less controlled. They are full of possibility. For Occhiogrosso, they show moments of joy and moments of failure, but most of all they are suggestive of what might happen next, someday soon . . .