A L I C E G R A S S I
NANA HOME GALLERY | PROJECT
Art blends with objects of intimacy and creates new possibilities, challenging the viewer to reflect on the traces and identities.
NaNa Home Gallery is a home turned into an art space/gallery, a non-conventional place where one can live art within the domestic walls.
Our mission is for the audience to feel open to dialogue and experimentation, to merge the lines between host and guest and as an independent and non-profit space we invite people to live our space in a dynamic and proactive way.
Opening 26 April 5 PM
7,7 lb || EXHIBITION || 2019
April 26 to May 10 || 2019
Mon-Fri – 5 to 8 PM - Morning by appointment
Please note: gallery hours are subject to change, please call oremail us to verify hours before visiting
info@alicegrassi.com |nanahomegallery@gmail.com| 604 655 3064 || 204 -1685 13th Ave W – Vancouver
Capture Photography Festival Vancouver
Nana Home Gallery
https://capturephotofest.com/gallery/nana-home-gallery/
KoobookArchive
On the Contemporary - Anna Guillot
CAPTURE FESTIVAL || EVENT
TALK
Apr 26, 2019 - 11:30 am – 2:00 pm
Join the artists of the exhibition 7,7lb, a show about the imaginary of motherhood, as they discuss the historical and social backgrounds of the topic and the profound changes that have occurred in the habits, feelings, and rituals surrounding motherhood.
With artists Carmen Cardillo, Tiziana Contino, Erica Belli, Anna Guillot (KooBookArchive), Emilia Castioni, and Matteo Spertini, moderated by Alice Grassi.
Light refreshments provided.
https://capturephotofest.com/events/77lb/
SCREENING
Apr 26, 2019 - 5:00 pm – 9:00 pm
Join the team at Nana Home Gallery for a screening of artists’ videos.
7,7lb exhibition on the theme of parenting and infancy. With videos by Tiziana Contino, Donatella De Cicco, and Chiara Tognoli.
Light refreshments provided.
https://capturephotofest.com/events/77lb-artist-video-screenings/
ARTISTS
ERICA BELLI
WORK | DADDY’S ISSUE
I became a parent a couple of years ago and along with that came many changes. While I was in the midst of it all, I started noticing somebody near me was going through very similar feelings in a very different way. My partner had switched many of his habits to become a dad and was now completely immersed in this role. I started photographing him and our son to understand their relationship, which seemed so sacred to me. Modern dads take care of their children and society expects quite highly from them. And while post partum depression and motherhood are widely explored themes, fathers are still in their own corner, trying to do the very best they can with very little support. In my personal story, the plot had also an intricated twist: I almost died giving birth and while the doctors were giving me surgery, minutes after my son was born, my partner had the privilege of spending the first three hours of his life alone, with him. He bundled the baby up with my clothes for smell and hoped for the best. Those three hours will never be given back to me I thought for a long time and I started fearing that my baby had imprinted on my partener, as he seemed much cooler when his dad was around. I felt less of a parent than him, I felt like I had so much to learn and all that was supposed to come natural to me, was in fact coming natural to him. I started photographing them to understand their relationship, what made it so special and what I could learn to be a parent and have something like those two had. Taking pictures of them has helped me incredibly understanding my new role and the sacrality of time with our babies.
http://www.ericabelli.com/
CARMEN CARDILLO
WORK | "M" PROJECT
Cardillo presents the "M" project: still fading images uploaded to the social network instagram, as a photographic work dedicated to her relationship with her daughter.
Since 2016 I post images recorded with my smartphone on Instagram, which I consider like a micro automatic home archive.
I'm interested in the absence of time in the social media, everything seems flattened and leveled out.
The past passes and does not pass at the same time, disappears and then re-emerges,. Perhaps photography teaches us to retrace ourselves.
In this virtual archive images of our little reality, of our day after day, float freely.
Faded images, evanescent, grainy, like in memories.
For the exhibition "7,7 lb" curated by Alice Grassi they were printed and my five year old daughter, has re-invented them, turning them into photo-objects of affection.
EMILIA CASTIONI
WORK | THE WEIGHT OF LOVE
Pregnancy:
So, how much have you gained?
Pay attention to the weight.
What is the presumed weight of your child?
What a huge belly, I think it will weight a lot!
Birth:
3780 kg!
It is the first thing they tell you as soon as the baby is born.
It is the first thing they ask you when the baby is born.
Feeding time:
How much do you eat?
How much has he gained?
Do you weight him before and after a feeding?
Perhaps he should weight more.
From the moment you conceive a child, one of the most important aspects that come along with you throughout the period of pregnancy and after the birth is the weight of this little person. This often turns into a cause of anxiety when the data does not correspond to the statistics imposed by medicine .
A small body that grows slowly in constant physical contact with the mother, who leans on the chest, on the legs and moves from one arm to the other, that sits on the shoulders or on the back.
For this show my desire is to recreate the pleasant feeling I feel every night when my son falls asleep completely lying on top of me.
The work presented consists of the creation of a pillow that reproduces the weight of my child at the time of birth.
The intent is to let those who want it, experience the physical sensation that a mother constantly has from the moment
TIZIANA CONTINO
WORK | EMOTIONAL REPLACEMENT
Actions repeated daily and the feelings associated them, try by the cloistered nuns that have inhabited the former monastery complex and its space, characterized by valuable architectural layers, use and emotional. This is the real point of concept of cloistered, the deprivation of contact with the outside world that can get even the rejection of the concept of other by itself, the unknown world and that this must remain as potentially contaminant that inspires Emotional Replacement, installation and interactive performance of Tiziana Contino.
text Ambra Stazzone
The violence derived from the impossibility of choice inflicted on last-born of rich families, who over the centuries have populated the cloistered convents of all the world. In the past the constraint that the clerical power used on these individuals has contributed to a process of self-exclusion from the world outside the walls of the convent eluding a participatory approach with “the other”. Also it has the power of a prevaricating man to manage the movement of the performer, held physically and emotionally in the same way many news stories today. The body is here rendered as historical filter of interaction that takes social role of cultural mediation instigating an involvement, collective action for change. The procedure is performed in an enriched version synaesthetically intervention audio musician CarloTuzza with its refined processes sounds a strategically sound system.
DONATELLA DI CICCO
WORK | DAIMON
Daimon is a film about maternity. It tells the story of four girls and the relationship with their children. It goes from the pregnancy of Lucy up to the first three years of Laura’s son; from the seven years of Sara’s daughter to the seventeen years of Chicca’s daughter. The film connects their lives and their stories through a unique point of view, the director’s one. She researches into the observation and the dialogue with her friends the answers to all the questions that naturally rise when you decide to become a mother.
In this film mothers act as a sort of Daimon, a philosophy archetypes, an individual who is between what is human and what is divine, with the purpose to mediate between these two dimensions. The main characters become the image of only one mother and their children the projection of only one child.
When I started making this film I didn’t know that I was soon going to become a mother too.
ALICE GRASSI
WORK | BREVE STORIA DELLA NATURA
The series Breve storia della Natura (Short Natural History) is a tale about a possible development of a seed in a dual form. This imaginary botanical figure moves driven by the desire of an ongoing dialogue. This work continues a reflection begun earlier with the “Spanish moss” video, in which the eponymous plant is in its specific relationship of interdependence with trees.
The binding of empathetic feeling moves towards the feeding, when the two parties mutually benefit of the primary nutrients, meant as knowledge as well as vital energy. The roots of this work will run along a thought about the possibility of a dialogue between generations and dwell on the question of origins.
KOOBOOKARCHIVE
THE LIFE OF AN ARTIST’S BOOK
LIGHT AND SENSITIVE
conceived by Anna Guillot
Anne Blum, Caroline Duchatelet, Alice Grassi, Anna Guillot, Marzia Migliora, Aleksandra Mir, Julian Opie, Zygmunt Piotrowski, Peter Wüthrich.
The exhibition comes out of a selection of artist’s books from the KoobookArchive. The common thread uniting the artists is research. Artists and works are brought together or are distinguished from one another by the use of traditional means such as drawing and painting, but also through experimentation in media with crossovers, most frequently between photography and video. These books are often created through offset printing in limited print-runs and in some cases come together with object elements or technological micro-accessories – they are to be considered as true and proper works.
The title, The Life of an Artist’s Book, Light and Sensitive, recalls the characteristics inherent to the artist’s book. Such books are steeped in thematic content and are the product of technical–technological experimentation, uniting theories, ideologies, conceptual or narrative ‘worlds’ since they are ‘indices of thought’ containable in a few brief folios, but they also allow, concretely, for a lightness and ease of conveyance of these ‘folios–worlds’.
Lightness is mentioned here with reference to specific gravity, because the artist’s book is almost always made of paper and small in size, but the reference is also to the medium used because sometimes, as a result of multi- or inter-medial operations, it also includes photography or video, i.e. an image that is ‘sensitive’ or ‘light’.
Thus a tiny book synthesizes the dense world of an artist; it can travel easily, it can be given as a present or on the contrary it can follow the laws of the art market, it can at the same time equally easily be lost or destroyed, preserved well, collected and passed on.
The life of an artist’s book can be brief or infinite, but as with any work it can contain the world, as existence and life.
STATEMENT
10 years ago the KoobookArchive started its activity, an archive-laboratory that is concerned not only simply with collecting, but above all with studying in depth and carrying out research in the field of the multiple and the artist’s book. In particular, it had occurred to me that if the contemporary artist’s book, beyond its own visual dimension, were to move towards video-sound and performative lines, it could emanate further and new spatial-temporal projections. Since then, I have invited collaborations from experts in the visual word, voice performers, video and sound artists, architects, photographers, graphic designers, publishers and theorists of languages, also establishing relationships with other research centres, archives, collections and art institutions, naturally opening myself, also as an artist and a teacher, to studies, in-depth studies and exchanges of experiences. These activities have also contributed to making the heritage of works and documents increasingly substantial.
It is thus media experimentation in general and digital intermediality, meant as study and research, that substantiate the dynamism of the KoobookArchive.
The Archive is based in Catania, Italy.
MATTEO SPERTINI
WORK | WHAT THE PRESIDENT DOES NOT KNOW
This is the diary of a year spent playing with the small guests of orphanages in Buryatia: a steppe land of Siberia, Russia. I believe that adults can’t know that the empire’s orphanages are actually harboring a treasure, made up of stubborn optimism. They can’t know of that obstinate patrimony, regardless of the young team’ poor, delinquent, wretched parents, alcoholic, soldiers, violent bastards sons of bitches.
This is why I chose to tell this story with my photos, with the children’s photos, through a contributed multilayer project.
CHIARA TOGNOLI
WORK | 70 RUPIES TO PARADISE ROAD
70 rupies to paradise road is the result of a wish of the choreographer Marina Rossi, who requested it as a complementary visual element to a solo dance performance. The video project takes its own path thanks to the energy generated by the peculiar situation the protagonist is experiencing at the time of filming. A mature woman struggling with her first pregnancy.
A difficult pregnancy, full of unspoken questions and a tension of the mind that transforms into a tension of the body. Belly, legs and arms stretched towards an unknown, unmentionable universe. Darkness that changes into a celestial, spatial cosmos. An astronaut body.
CURATOR STATEMENT
Alice Grassi is a multimedia artist who’s been working in collaboration with other artists and collectives.
She is interested in an interactive and participatory approach that seldom involves communities tied to the territory and often adopts outdoor installations as well.
The main topics of her previous works are mostly focused on the relationship between human and territory seen as emotional places.
In this instance, she experiments with a home gallery where she invited four artists to think about the imaginary of inhabit.
HOME SWEET HOME || EXHIBITION || 2018
How do people decide to inhabit somewhere? What do they carry within them when they think of home, and what while they are living there? How do we perceive what we call home?
In a metaphorical dimension where four different everyday weave together, desires, possibilities and paradox meet.
In a time of migrations and constant change of living, four artists investigate what home away from home is.
The exhibition will take the audience into a journey within a home, a participatory reality where one is invited to interact and dialog with the theme of inhabit.
Opening 20 April 5 PM
Exhibition 20 to 30 April 2018
Mon-Sun – 5 to 9 PM - Morning by appointment
Please note: gallery hours are subject to change, please call oremail us to verify hours before visiting
info@alicegrassi.com |nanahomegallery@gmail.com| 604 655 3064 || 204 -1685 13th Ave W – Vancouver
Grant London Drugs
ARTISTS
ERICA BELLI
STATEMENT
Erica Belli is an artist exploring the Everyday, the common people and the uneventful stories.
Her vision is a diary, ever looking at whatever surrounds and obsesses her: the neighborhood, her travel companions, migrants: she looks at everything with a cunning eye and the will to devouring it all.
Her subjects seem to reflect her curiosity with their smiling faces, feeling clearly at ease with her.
They want to be part of her story.
The search for intimacy and her choice to subvert the rules and use disposables, polaroids and film are only an addendum to her vernacular iconography where she challenges the audience to wonder if the everyday can be so incredibly exciting.
BIO
Born in 1988 in a tiny village on the mountain border between Switzerland and Italy, I started photographing as a teenager with a 135mm camera, then moved around the world to pursue my own vision. I attended the Italian-Institute-of-Photography and CFP-Bauer to better sharpen my tools and I now live near Lake Como where I raise my newborn and work on my art.
WORK | STILL/LIMBO
What does it mean to be still for a year or more? Somewhere far away from what you remember home is?I lived in contact with a community of men coming from Africa who came to Europe through the infamous boats crossing illegally the Mediterranean sea.
They were stationed into a building where they needed to be living all together while waiting on their papers; they couldn't leave or they would lose their chance to have them, and every night had to sign in.
The group was allocated in a small village between Italy and Switzerland, a very different place from what they used to call home, but the same one where I come from.
CAPTION | STILL/LIMBO
2014
BN analog photograph, printed on gelatin silver print
BN gelatin silver print
http://www.ericabelli.com/
ENECE
STATEMENT
ENECE film devotes itself to represent reality.
It accomplishes documentary films and experimental films poised between fiction, reality and audiovisual products. It devotes itself to design, direction, editing, photography, sound, evaluation of archives films and post-production.
ENECE film produces its own projects and professional of audiovisual research.
BIO
ENECE film was founded in 2012 by Pietro de Tilla, Elvio Manuzzi, Tommaso Perfetti, Chiara Tognoli and Guglielmo Trupia combining the different professionalisms matured within the visual experimentation environment, the editing and sound research.
WORK – IL TURNO
The Camonica Valley.
While at Cedegolo, a village down the valley, an employee of the electricity supplier society carries out his daily duties high up in the mountains.
At the "Arno" lake dam his work-pals, keepers of the dam, wait to be relieved by the next shift coming in by helicopter.
The shift is itself a documentary in which the observation, besides its stylistic value, becomes a composition yard stick, a way through which recounting and highlighting the simple stories of living and working men.
CAPTION | IL TURNO
Movie by Enece Film - Pietro De Tilla, Elvio Manuzzi, Tommaso Perfetti
33' minutes, year: 2012 / Italy
Produced and promoted by Cultural District Valle Camonica and Lab 80 film. Valle Camonica Museum System. "Casa dolce Casa", a research on inhabit as a sense on the intimate and daily dimension of life.
FESTIVAL
Visions du reel, ViaEmiliaDoc Fest, London International Documentary Festival, Milano Film Festival, Trento Film Festival, Longlake Festival Lugano, Al jazeera International Documentary Film Festival, Raindance film festival, Working Title film festival, In-edit festival, Filmmaker fest, Brief Encounters, Biografilm fest, Film Festival dokumenter Yogyakarta, Backup festival, Cinémathèque de Grenoble
http://www.enecefilm.com/
trailer: https://vimeo.com/63396970
ALICE GRASSI
STATEMENT
The artist is pervaded by an experimental taste: the outcomes are some of the most telling mises-en-scéne, be they of objects, or people. Grassi suggests a way of looking at, and “feeling” the world that is at the same time attractive and repulsive as a ”cruel hirony”.
Objects and animated beings come much to the same nature; unexpected shots portray deformed perspectives intended to inject doubts about the identities we are perceiving: Humans or non-Humans?
The endless ambiguity of our perception, as much shaped by the external world as by an inner, psychological, dreamful, and perhaps illusory, dimension.
BIO
Alice Grassi is a multimedia Italian artist now based in Vancouver.
She studied at Brera Academy of Art, Photography at IED and obtained a MA in Lighting Design, Politecnico, Milan. She was invited at several national and international exhibitions.
Among which, 3 at Fondazione Sandretto Re-Rebaudengo. The Foundation granted and acquired a work that entered in the collection. She has been shown at Photovernissage, St.Petersburg, Russia, Controforma, Daegu, Korea, at New Music Festival, Hong Kong and at Yong Siew Toh Conservatory, Singapore.
She has been selected by the Master artist Jean Marc Bustamante for the artist in residences ACA Atlantic Center for the Arts, Florida. She won the Intersection Prize/KunstArt - and was finalist at Premio-Cairo and Celeste-Prize.
WORK – UNSWEETENED
“Unsweetened” is a part of “Home sweet Home”, a multimedia project about the inhabit.
As parts of the skin and flesh, provided with beating organs, the houses represent the sphere of thinking as a sort of psychological portraits. The architecture interacts with the environment. The relationship between the objects and the surrounding Nature create continuous games of correspondences, across a continuous flow of actions-reactions.
The House-portraits reflect an inner place in which the path traced represent a geography of emotions.
CAPTION | UNSWEETENED (Home sweet Home)
2009
Colors photographs on metal paper
(Part of multimedia work | Photo | Video | Photo Art-book)
27x40 cm
Video
3'44", Video color HD | 4:3 | Direction D.O.P editing: Alice Grassi | Actress: Daniela La Mattina | Original soundtrack: Will'em Gator | Propman: Antonio Pilade
Photo - Artbook | Hardcover grey box cloth binding, 25 x 21 cm
Colors photographs on metal paper | Edition of 10, Signed and numbered | Video
Courtesy of
KoobookArchive || http://koobookarchive.blogspot.ca/p/libri-inediti.html || http://www.koobookarchive.it/ || Anna Guillot
VLADIMIR PROTIC
BIO
Vladimir Protic (1975), Serbian. Video artist, writer puppeteer and a jazz musician. In ex Yugoslavia better known as Dr Protic or Jaganjac due to his pioneering video clips at the very beginning of Youtube. In Vancouver since 2017. where is better unknown as the Flooring Guy.
STATEMENT
On the seventh day upon arriving to Canada i started working as a laminae and hardwood installer, the trade i never did before. The job let me into the houses of average and not so average Canadians, into around 100 homes and offices. This voyeur position gave an insight that led to some patterns of which I would emphasis the obsession with perfection of the floor.
My work is an insight into decadent society in which people crawl on their knees looking for dents on the wood, demand the replacement of barely visible damaged tiles, inspect in socks every foot of their laminate, ask for staining the pin wide holes on transitions and shoe moldings, and literary call for praying over the cracking sound of laminate to be gone, while at a very moment a million acres of woods is burning in British Columbia and cover the modern Sodom in smoke. With this work I would like to show that the road to hell is paved with laminate and hardwood planks.
CURATOR STATEMENT
Alice Grassi is a multimedia artist who’s been working in collaboration with other artists and collectives.
She is interested in an interactive and participatory approach that seldom involves communities tied to the territory and often adopts outdoor installations as well.
The main topics of her previous works are mostly focused on the relationship between human and territory seen as emotional places.
In this instance, she experiments with a home gallery where she invited four artists to think about the imaginary of inhabit.
EVENT - TALK
CITIES AS A VISION
“Cities as a vision” is a talk with “Bordelight” and “Seeside”, two artists’ collectives centered on participatory art, where the public becomes fundamental to the creative process and the work itself.
The artists are invited to speak about the theme of cities and inhabit, how this influences and characterizes what they do and how they developed two of their most famous pieces in Milan and Gibellina (Sicily) where the artists interacted with local people, shared and developed with them the final art work.
20 April - Friday - 11:30 am 2 pm
TALK | Cities as a vision
artists’ collectives
11:30 Bordelight
12:45 Seeside
21 April - saturday – 11:30 am 2 pm
TALK | Cities as a vision
artists of the exhibition | Home sweet Home
11:30 Erica Belli
12:45 Enece Film
BORDERLIGHT
TALK 20 April - Friday - 11:30
“Where do you want to bring light?”
Is the main question of the collective Borderlight asked to Milanese.
Formed by artists and designers, the group gave life to a grand participative project with its own name:
“Borderlight”.
An environmental installation (that combines Art and Light Design), designed to involve the citizens of the city into a new narration of Milan, using light as an artistic tool to explore and reimagine the city.
Through different light installations, Milan’s outskirt is transformed into a place of socialization and meeting,leaving behind the frugal and quick way spaces are usually lived.
Milan’s metropolitan area is full of underpasses, gardens, passages and residual spaces.
Borders are often perceived as dark, scary or ugly and people usually decides not to exploit them.
Metaphorically, lightening means taking care and underlining little-known spaces, the ones in our everyday life we forget to pay attention to.
The project was launched in April 2016 during the Fuorisalone in Milan, in partnership with Brera Design District, with the contribution of Cariplo Foundation, the institutional partnership of the City of Milan and the sponsorship of iGuzzini Italia. On that occasion a large installation lightened and brought to life a bridge and the surrounding area.
SEESIDE
TALK 20 April - Friday - 11:30 am
SEESIDE is a duo-collective (Alice Grassi and Arianna Catania) that works in the art field.
They are interested in the relationship with people and territory. “Seeside” is part of the On Image Association.
(Arianna Catania is director of Festival Internazionale di Fotografia- Open Air
Gibellina PhotoRoad. She is also a photo editor, journalist and independent curator.
Alice Grassi is a multimedia artist. She exhibits and had artists’s residency in Italy and abroad.)
PROJECT: ROUNDTRIP - OSSERVATORIO SUD - GIBELLINA
Cities are not only made of streets and buildings but also of memory and emotions.
The duo collective “Seeside” worked together on “Roundtrip”, a participatory project made in collaboration with the youth of Gibellina (Sicily) that moved to North Italy or Europe because of the unemployment issue within the city.
The artists made photo-portraits, printed it on 1:1 scale and then installed it on the windows of the buildings in the city. The evanescent portraits seemed real people and in this way were symbolically brought back in their own homeland.
https://alicegrassi.it/roundtrip-light
https://www.onimage.it/what/
© Alice Grassi 2016