Embroidery and contemporary photography on exhibit with APPUNTI DI FOTOGRAFIE at SCD Studio Perugia

SCD Studio, via Bramante 22N (zona Monteluce) Perugia
May 6 – June 3 2023
Opening saturday May 6 2023, at 5:00 pm

Artists Federica Bernardi, Nadia Frasson, Paola Rizzi, Natalia Saurin, Beatrice Speranza
Curated by  Giorgio Bonomi

Info  e-mail scdtextileandartstudio@gmail.com | mob. +39 347 177 6001
www.scdtextileandartstudio.wordpress.com

Digital catalog downloadable from the site

The new exhibition proposed by SCD Studio in Perugia (Via Bramante 22N) will be inaugurated Saturday, May 6, 2023, at 5 p.m.. The exhibition “Appunti di fotografie” is curated by Giorgio Bonomi, with artworks by Federica Bernardi, Nadia Frasson, Paola Rizzi, Natalia Saurin and Beatrice Speranza.

An exhibition that – writes Bonomi in the catalogue – presents five women artists who work with “photography” and “embroidery,” and it should be emphasized that just as photography has gone beyond being a mere reproduction of reality and has become so much more both as a poetic and as a technique, so much so that it can be said to be a “material” and a “mode” of execution like canvas and painting or marble and sculpture, the same goes for  “embroidery” for women artists, which becomes a process for the creation of the work. The artists, apart from certain common aspects, present themselves with their own style and poetics: some make self-portraits, others photograph natural environments, others still use “found” photographs (e.g., postcards). The expressive contents are abandoned places, along the lines of Woodman’s, reflections on spirituality on the body, one’s own and others’, on memory, on communication with oneself and others. Obviously all the artists intervene with thread (and needle) on the chosen photographic material and here too we notice the differences which are chromatic and compositional, in fact some use embroidery as a “sign” others as an “image” and this, in some cases, may depict “real” elements.

Federica Bernardi‘s project is inspired by the 1920s film of the same name, “Freaks,” whose protagonists were “freaks on the leash”, articulated in a series of photographs printed on canvas on which the artist later intervened with reliefs and embroidery. Here the women are shown with obvious alterations of the body, exaggerating some of the features that society imposes on us, while highlighting other details deemed unimportant.

With needle and thread, Nadia Frasson tells about her present and through photography explores her body, scrutinizes its changes, being surprised to find poetry in what in the eyes of today’s society is a flaw to be hidden. The folds, the wrinkles, the signs of time become the focus of her research. She overlaps, tears, brings close and embroiders. A game that is storytelling, that becomes harmony before her eyes. Everything, even the greatest pain is smoothed out and with needle and thread she tells a story that accompanies her and that she loves to share.

With “The Memory Box,” Paola Rizzi proposes a diptych in which textured images of peeling walls of places dear to her are juxtaposed with self-portraits where the figure of the photographer appears evanescent ready to emerge from distant, faded memories. Rizzi invites to hold memories and preserve them, a kind of therapy of remembrance that passes through her moments to become universal by inviting to action those who will come into possession of the box to enrich it with their memories. Behind each diptych, printed on delicate rice paper (the very symbol of fragility) and paired with a postcard made of fine cotton paper (the symbol of material value), ten blank postcards have been placed where she invites people to leave personal memories.

Natalia Saurin exhibits a project begun during the lockdown when she intervened on some vintage postcards dedicated to love or, rather, stereotypes about love. Among other things, these postcards embody a desire for absolute and unique correspondence (“like our love”), the ideal of romantic love that is often the basis of unbalanced, unhealthy, sometimes violent relationships. While it also includes positive aspects, it has come to be identified with patriarchy. With needle and thread, Saurin has tried to bring out subtle energies in a representation where everything seems motionless, where time is frozen as in a fairy tale, as infinite as romantic love, which, in the imaginary ideal she refers to, knows no limits even after death.

Inspired by Mont Blanc and the soaring peaks towards the sky, Beatrice Speranza traced in that landscape the presence of both male and female spirituality, two different ways of expressing themselves, of perceiving the divine: the former manifested in the aerial spaces of the sky, without form or boundaries, beyond physical reality, distant, perfect, inviting us to raise our perspectives; the latter identified with tangible and visible reality, anchored to the earth of which it is a part, concrete, rooted in matter and attainable, helping us to connect with the experience of life, to transfer the sacred into the everyday. Two different yet complementary spiritual paths. With her embroidered photos, Hope investigates this duality: the desire for elevation and at the same time the sacredness of nature, of mother earth. Hope brings heaven to earth, and binds both in an embrace in the desire for union.

The exhibition will be on view until June 3, 2023.