Artist Registry
The White Columns Curated Artist Registry is an online platform for emerging and under-recognized artists to share images and information about their respective practices. The Registry seeks to create a context for artists who have yet to benefit from wider critical, curatorial or commercial support. To be eligible, artists cannot be affiliated with a commercial gallery in New York City.
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STATEMENT OF WORK
Artist Statement 2023 Val Sivilli
I make paintings depicting tools, toys, feral beasts, and strong opinions with a nod toward expressive abstraction. Everyday objects become larger truths that serve as harbingers of an interior world beckoning provocative questions of the exterior world. By stitching the past into the present through the familiar, collective meaning transcends quotidian.
Strong dynamics are possible when the activity of painting combines with the graphic quality of printmaking. I often use stencils and direct printing to facilitate repetition. It is in that repetition that familiar objects often become symbolic versions of themselves, deepening their resonance. Repetition invokes the past, teasing out memory and calls on history to accentuate subtle nuances that connect the political present through the personal past.
Marrying the graphic quality of printing with the visceral characteristics of paint assists me in maximizing the vast possibilities inherent in the formal qualities of color and composition of which I am very interested. Combining printmaking and painting helps me to uncover an elusive hidden narrative in each individual project through the discoveries made when applying formal artmaking concepts. When paint, palette, composition, and narrative find their role, the true essence of the work emerges.