On Thursday October 5, 2017, Ringling Underground and Artist Liaison Ender Wilde presents:
A Ringling Museum Courtyard Exhibition of local artists Joe Loccisano, Rachel Zucker, and Kierra Boyd.
Ethereal Cosmos engages place, purpose, and the human experience. Joe Loccisano, Rachel Zucker and Kierra Boyd explore notions of self through expressive lines, vibrant colors, and counter-worlds. Surreal yet familiar images invite viewers into personal phantasmagorias which act as platforms to challenge intrapersonal and social relationships.
Finding inspiration in the human experience, archetypal images, and emotions, Joe Loccisano collages found images, gesture drawing and decorative collections to create miniature homes wrapped in dramatic compositions of natural and manmade elements. Joe contrasts the artistic tradition and his openness to experimental techniques through juxtaposing pensive figures and ethereal landscapes within his “Antiquities Cosmologia”. A recent shift to installation creates a new purpose for his intricate drawings, to transform exhibition spaces into places of meditation both personal and collective.
Rachel Zucker composes lowbrow, surreal portraits that focus on the complexities of the femme fatale, arranged within a counterworld in which one experiences the seduction of MOTEK (her pseudonym). Dark ethereal themes occupy most of her work, setting seductive feminine figures into ambiguous, otherwordly environments. Viewers are heavily entranced by the mysterious and vibrant quality of her paintings. Inspired by the mysterious women of contemporary club culture, MOTEK entices the gaze while also making the viewer feel unsettled or impotent. Her work establishes the female figure’s escape from the male gaze and emergence as a warden of her own being.
Kierra Boyd offers monsters as a means to communicate the difficulty of transitioning into adulthood. Kierra considers monsters to be both ethnographic and apotropaic, meaning she uses monsters to represent the culture and customs in which she navigates on a daily basis, as well as repel evil or unsettling emotions. Through a series of myths, composed of unnatural colors and impossible landscapes, monsters become manifestations of Kierra’s emotional exploration focusing on the anxiety she faces in interpersonal relationships and her in own art-making process, providing an understanding of the contemporary coming of age story.