Santina Amato and Curator Lisa Freiman have a conversation about the artist’s exhibition, Santina Amato:

Convulsive Beauty.

Convulsive Beauty is on view at Bucknell University’s Samek Art Museum's Downtown Gallery from April 14 through June 12, 2021.

"Beauty will be convulsive or not at all … Convulsive beauty will be veiled-erotic, fixed-explosive, magic circumstantial or not at all." 

-- André Breton

The exhibition title Convulsive Beauty derives from the irrational and contradictory concept that André Breton introduced in his books Nadja (1928) and Mad Love (1937). Conceived, planned, and installed via Zoom calls and email in the midst of a global pandemic, Convulsive Beauty was literally created as an out-of-body, virtual, nearly-cyborgian experience between the artist and curator. The exhibition includes abstract works – photographs, ceramics, and new digital prints – that touch upon the notion of the psychosexual body as a living organism and a site of desire. The work has an uncanny sensibility: portraits show women in familiar domestic settings covered mysteriously in amorphous, oozing piles of dough that approximate their weight; biomorphic white ceramic vessels with shiny, screaming-red interiors suggest fleshy genitalia and bodily orifices awaiting penetration. The latest work, which has never been exhibited before, is made from digital

line drawings that Amato has populated with film stills from her Amateur Porn series. She then manipulates the resulting contorted abstractions that intertwine and writhe like body parts. While diverse in medium and appearance, these works share a common vocabulary of colors and biomorphic shapes that simultaneously allude to the interior and exterior states of the body.

Santina Amato was born in Australia to Italian immigrants and has lived and worked in the USA since 2010. Her practice includes a wide range of mediums and formats from painting to sewn sculptures, installations,

sculptures, video, and photographic works, and live performances. Amato is interested in the physical nature of varying materials that relate to the domestic environment, such as bread dough, bedsheets, fresh produce, as well as the labor processes used when working with these materials. As a material focus, she often uses bread dough in unexpected ways in installations, sculptures, video and photographic works, and in live settings. For Amato, the life cycle of dough is a powerful metaphor for exploring the ideas of birth and decay, bodily processes, sexuality, and the erotic. When yeast is activated by warm water and sugar, the cells of it split and divide similarly to when an egg is fertilized by sperm. There is a peak moment when dough is voluptuous, full, and ripe, just before it begins to 'die.'

Lisa Freiman is an internationally recognized curator, museum professional, and professor with over thirty years of experience in the field of contemporary art. Freiman has supported a diverse array of emerging and underrecognized artists throughout the United States and abroad with major exhibitions, commissions, acquisitions, and publications. Throughout her career, she has maintained a steadfast interest in feminist art practices, collaboration, and the contemporary recuperation of historic Surrealism. Freiman currently works as an independent curator and writer with a tenured faculty appointment in Virginia Commonwealth University's School of the Arts in Richmond, Virgina.

Amato's performance, Seedbed, 2019 has been included in Emergency INDEX Vol. 9 publication and is now available for pre-order on the link below. Publishing release date is December 15th, 2020.

The pages of Emergency INDEX are open to all who work with performance. In each annual volume, contributors document works made in the previous year. By including performances regardless of their country of origin, genre, aims, or popularity, INDEX reveals the breathtaking variety of practices used in performance work today. Each volume features a comprehensive index of key terms used by contributors in describing and discussing their own work.

Begun in 2011, INDEX is a lens for seeing the field of contemporary performance from the ground up.

INDEX Vol. 9 presents 310 works from 55 countries performed during 2019, documented in the words of their creators.

Facebook Live

Artist-in-Residence Santina Amato will be presenting on her work and practice to date, and the work created while AIR at Bethany Arts Community.

Follow link to view recording.

Bethany Arts Community

40 Somerstown Rd,

Ossining, NY

10562, United States

https://bethanyarts.org/

Santina Amato is will be Artist-in-Residence at Bethany Arts Community in Ossining, NY. Amato intends on creating new work using cotton bedsheets sourced from eBay, natural beeswax and pine rosin to create outdoor sculptures that are designed to decompose over time.

Screening on the third floor of MOCA Tucson

Museum of Contemporary Art

265 South Church Avenue

Tucson, AZ, 85701

Thursday December 12th, 2019

7pm – 9pm including Q&A.

.

Current MOCA Tucson Artist in Residence Santina Amato, is proud to present Angeliki, a durational video portrait of a women with her weight in dough. The durational video is 83 minutes long, capturing dough slowly creeping to consume a woman and her personal space. It is the first time Amato will be presenting one of her full length video works within a public screening setting.

.

The creation of this work was partially supported by the City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events 2019 Individual Artist Grant and is an ongoing series.

.

Amato’s position as AIR at MOCA Tucson is partially supported by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council Agency.

Join us for an evening talk with our newest Artist in Residence, Santina Amato.

December 3rd, 7.30pm – 8.30pm

Museum of Contemporary Art

520.624.5019

265 South Church Avenue

Tucson, AZ, 85701

Admission

Members: Free

Public: $10