Work by Eleonora Gugliotta, Installation view, "Ambienti", Casa Regis

The exhibition has arrived!

Casa Regis proudly hosts the group exhibition "The Limits and Outerlimits of Line", curated by L. Mikelle Standbridge, on display from April 21 to May 26, 2024. The artworks span multiple mediums, ranging from fiber art, to works on paper, to installation to performance. Utilizing the eight exhibition spaces, Italian and international artists will be featured, with representation from Iran, Holland, Finland, China, The United States, and of course Italy. Each artist, with a meditation on their medium of choice has been invited to address the theme, which could either be a straightforward encounter with the gesture of a line, or a visual pun, or a metaphysical investigation into knowing or defining tout court.

 

The ten artists participating in this exhibition include: Italian, photographer, Silvia Gaffurini; Chinese, but American based, sculptor, Zhiheng Gong; American photographer, Tyler Green; Italian installation/conceptual artist, Eleonora Gugliotta; Finish multidisciplinary, Suvi Hanninen; Dutch textile artist, Anneke Klein; American painter/collage/installation artist, Natalie Lanese; Italian painter and performance-video artist, Gianluigi Maria Masucci; Italian performance artist, Andrea Mori; and Iranian mixed media artist, Ashkan Sanei.

A performance by Andrea Mori will take place during the closing event, aver having spent 7 days in the woods.

 Save these dates...

 April 21 to May 26, 2024

Borgata Marchetto 18, Valdilana (BI), Italia

Hours: Each Sunday 3-6PM or by appointment

Guided visits every hour

Closing event: May 26, 3-6 PM with performance by Andrea Mori at 4:16 PM

For those of you who would like to know more...

The Limits and Outerlimits of Line

 Casa Regis - Center for Culture and Contemporary Art proudly hosts the group exhibition "The Limits and Outerlimits of Line", curated by L. Mikelle Standbridge, on display from April 21 to May 26, 2024. The artworks span multiple mediums, ranging from fiber art, to works on paper, to installation to performance. Utilizing the eight exhibition spaces, Italian and international artists will be featured, with representation from Holland, Iran, Finland, China, The United States, and of course Italy. Each artist, with a meditation on their medium of choice has been invited to address the theme, which could either be a straightforward encounter with 2D graphics, or a visual pun, or a metaphysical investigation into knowing or defining tout court.

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Silvia Gaffurini

Is there closure or finiteness in a line? Italian photographer Silvia Gaffurini, in her series "L'Ottava Lampada (The Eighth Lamp), proposes the antithesis of determined space, as she opens up structural and landscape possibilities to include projected volumes and imagined usages. Inspired by the writings of John Ruskin (key figure in Victorian England, known for innovative themes on monument restoration) and in particular his essay, "The Seven Lamps of Architecture", Gaffurini invents her own continuation on his theme with new chapter titles such as, The Lamp of Permanence, The Lamp of Reminiscence, and The Lamp of Resource. With the addition of fictitious architectural parameters - etched and embossed in relief on the photographs - she hypothesizes traces of a prior livelihood as much as a futuristic reassembling. In order to generate molecular variations for new models of construction, Gaffurini uses generative Artificial Intelligence plus 3D rendering softwares applied to the actual stone ruins found on location. The viewer is accompanied through the stages of speculation on conservation and invention as the artist experiments with display and printing techniques on new materials. 

Silvia Gaffurini, "l'Ottava Lampada, lampada della permanenza"

Zhiheng Gong

With an eye on the future, Chinese creator Zhiheng Gong, based in the US, speaks in the dual language of sculpture and product design. Inspired by the architecture of Santiago Calatrava (in particular, the Reggio Emilia high speed train station, Mediopadana in Italy), Gong assembles parts to make a whole. Seen from one point of view, you see only formless thin lines. Seen from another point of view, the hundreds of lines are also solid shapes, mounting and descending, forming both furniture and art. "mEat" is not a table as some of his most iconic pieces are, but is suspended in an "objectness" arena dedicated to his past and his family in China, where it was forbidden - for a person with education and status - to go in the kitchen and touch raw meat. He often animates his new found experience of touching meat with "projection mapping".

Zhiheng Gong, Installation view, "mEat"

Suvi Hanninen

Another creator not worried about categories, Finnish costume designer Suvi Hanninen with her sculpture "The Surge" crosses back and forth from fabric to paper to wire. Unable to accept limitations in her genre, she harbours the love of manual labour - tearing, braiding, shredding, intertwining - and most importantly breaking down materials to their filaments to be recomposed in a much lighter version. Playing with (e)motional materiality of fibers, her works are bodies not dissimilar to the real bodies wearing her designs, responding in movement while adapting to the air and heat in the environment. 

Suvi Hanninen, Installation view, "The Surge"

Anneke Klein

Dutch textile artist Anneke Klein in her own words says she uses "the most common weaving techniques" but due to the intricacy of her mental framework over which she maps a social architecture, her pieces read as quite complex. Through a restricted colour palette of whites and blacks woven into grid patterns, there is a sense of rationality, control or confinement, the way calendars, agendas, graphs or data-collection tables might make you feel. However the geometry is destabilized by squiggly marks, by fragments of an uncoded language, by gestures of the human hand. In this series, "Straight Line Thinking", the repetition of small, rigid spaces solidifies the structure, but airiness, softness, and lightness create the texture. I believe she is saying something about life.

Anneke Klein, "Straight Line Thinking", installation view

Eleonora Gugliotta
The site-specific textile installations, "Ambienti" (Environments) by Eleonora Gugliotta also weigh two opposing forces, in this case, the dark corners of forgotten architectural spaces and the enlightenment of playful visitations upon them. The Milan based Italian interdisciplinary artist is working on site at Casa Regis in the as yet unrestored attic, where generations of noble families and then nuns left their bedding, their bedding, their icons, their rabbit cages...Selecting locations abandoned or in disuse, but that still have a calling to be seen, reheard, or updated, the artist intervenes with a soft touch to rethread the human narrative with colourful yarn, to pull the decay into the contemporary.

Eleonora Gugliotta, Installation view, "Ambienti"

Natalie Lanese

American painter Natalie Lanese is also engaging the social and visual inheritance of Casa Regis in her large-scale, site-specific piece "Swathe". Her abstract painting is immersive, not only because it is 10 meters long and envelopes the room from floor to ceiling, as the title implies, but it activates visual complicity through a phenomenon called "disruptive camouflage". Based on early 20th C. studies of perception, animals with stripes, like zebras, although eye-catching, were actually harder to pinpoint in nature - a painting technique used for a period by the British military (WWI) for warships. The exhibition room at Casa Regis is as varied as nature, but from vestiges of human taste - late Baroque ceiling frescoes, mural prints, biblical scenery in the boiserie, bi-coloured hexagon floor tiles... Lanese's vibrant and vivid longitudinal stripes actually make a seamless transition because of the existing competing patterns, styles, colour palettes and geometries. 

Natalie Lanese, Installation view, 'Swathe'

Ashkan Sanei

Iranian mixed media artist Ashkan Sanei - typically working in multiplicities of overlapping, crisscrossed, intersecting lines, mixing collage and ink on paper - used this occasion to work on semi transparent waxed surfaces that, once hung, include the traces, scratches, and markings of the historical walls of Casa Regis. His materials are strips of scotch tape, holding sections of cement together, which is an appropriate metaphor for the historical structure in which he is exhibiting! 

Ashkan Sanei, Installation view, "Untitled"

Gianluigi Marie Masucci

For Italian artist Gianluigi Marie Masucci, location is everything. His beloved native Naples is the starting point, literally, for alignment. His extensive research into the historic maps of this ancient city leads to his identification of the energetic crossroads that line up with the major thoroughfares. The linear intersections are not by chance important places of social congregation, and through events involving an extended public, incorporating fire, light, and voices, Masucci re-opens the portals for people to connect. His video "La Congiunzione degli Opposti" (The Conjunction of opposites) documents this work VIDEO LINK. In a different format, this time ink on paper, his "Dichiarazione d'Amore" (Declaration of Love) is still dedicated to Naples and not only merges lines with human presence, but conflates them to represent one and the same. Starting from the street view and looking up at the laundry hung out of the apartment buildings lining the street, Masucci observes, to the point of obsession, the undulating cloth in the breeze that from below is a more like a 2D image. He views this to the point of interiorizing the scene, that then working simultaneously ambidextrously in a kind of neuro-muscular trance, he draws. These hundreds of squiggly small markings while perfectly abstract also somehow depict people, as in a crowd, as in a society, as in the population of a city. 

Gianluigi Maria Masucci, “Rivoluzione”

Tyler Green

For American nature photographer Tyler Green working in the Pacific Northwest corner of the United States, the simulation of a line translates to a before and after, to an alive or dead. In terms of future deforestation, he is projecting a horizontal laser beam on to the old-growth tree trunks, contemplating where loggers' next cut might be. These "Incisions" as he calls them, let the viewer savour the great breadth and height of the existing trees, while simultaneously weighing introspective questions of need vs. greed. In his "Ghosts" series, vertical light projections stand in, as if the souls, for the felled trees. 

Tyler Green, "Clear Lake II", from the series "The Missing Forest, Ghosts"

Andrea Mori -  Performance "IN BOSCATO"

Also in a searching relationship with the woods, Andrea Mori shifts the conundrum from physical to psychological. Growing up in the Alpine region of Northern Italy, Andrea is an atypical artist. Graduating from l'Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera, where his thesis was on Walking, he "performs" the process, which is all about bumping up against the self-imposed, mental limitations of humans. Usually in the form of structure-free adventures in nature, he reflects, registers, and then shares. We will find out more on his encounter with himself and predetermined thought patterns, hopefully dispelled, after he returns from his 7 day sojourn wandering the woods. He will meet the public for the closing event and communicate his findings through movement, and if compelled, words. His all white hand stitched walking attire is on display. 

Thank you for not only following our news but being our news. With enormous gratitude,

L. Mikelle Standbridge

email:infocasaregis@gmail.com

WWW.CASAREGIS.ORG