Italian New Media Artist Stefano Mitrione's
chemical series creates an eerie effect by merging images of sensuality with chemical
pollution.
Chemical Bath Sensuality 6, photography, 20" x 28"
Hannah Arendt, a German philosopher, said that
when people come together and talk, they create a "space of appearance"
of tremendous active power in the public realm. This force is born from
the human ability to agree with others on the need to act in concert.
Hence, these spaces of appearance are spaces of communication, where
citizens' interests, needs and strategies are shared. This intention can
be evaluated as a way to posit a direct connection between the designers
selected from history and the reestablished aesthetics. In this
scenario, the introduction of the common acknowledgement serves to
ground the narrative in the artist's intention in such a way that it
makes the intimate bond between its presence and its referencing serve
as an unassailable foundation for the projects being presented. And
despite the use of different methods and approaches, this new generation
all share qualities that are often subordinated to this underlying
narrative.
Chemical Star (detail), photography, 20" x 28"
Stefano Mitrione, one of Italian-American's more controversial Inter-Media
Artist, brings a diversity of specific individual determinations, which
appear to take place in a particular temporal and spatial relationship,
to his work. Stefano Mitrione, and its patent subjectivism, is anchored
in the significant role that the media plays in constructing and
manipulating reality. As a result, he uses images of artistic events
that appear in daily digestive methodologies such as the Web,
recapturing those images in a totally different frame. In an age when we
can effortlessly search information at any given moment, who needs an
old-fashioned memory? Cameras and lenses abound everywhere - from
surveillance equipment in banks to surreptitiously hidden devices in
elevators. It seems that we no longer need to bother our brains to
catalogue any of the events in our lives - the analog human memory is
quickly becoming supplanted by technologically mediated data played back
on the Web. The decade of grand narratives and ideologies, the loss of a
meaningful social perspective, the impossibility of conceiving that the
totality of the world is accompanied by an enormous concentration of
fragmentary identities, and the internationalization and expansion of
meaning enshrined in an unfathomable multitude of "small
historicizations" of non-narrative constructs: Stefano Mitrione goes
through these notions and brings out visual aspects of the activities
from his surrounding. Stefano Mitrione's observations and artworks
undoubtedly offer a window into an explosive combination of
philosophical and political thoughts, and into the multilayered ways in
which these inform his project praxis.
Blackpool, photography, 20" x 20"
|