Rose Briccetti. NATURE MORTE AU CHYTRID & CANDIDA (2015)
Rose Briccetti, who received her MFA at UCSB in 2017, and who was an exemplary Teaching Assistant in Art 1A Visual Literacy, will be giving an Artist Talk on Thursday, March 8 from 12:30-1:45 in BioEngineering 1001.
Rose Briccetti is an intermedia artist living and working in Santa Barbara, CA. She is currently the College of Creative Studies Teaching Fellow at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Rose Briccetti. SPRAWLING NEOBIOTIC CHIMERA (AFTER BANKS' FLORILEGIUM), 2017
Artist Statement:My interdisciplinary and intermedia practice combines deep historical, artistic, and scientific research with artmaking to re-present natural and cultural histories through a feminist lens. My work weaves together strange truths, biology, museology, cultural myths, female sexuality, internet culture, and personal experience using humor and vivid visuals.
I am influenced by an array of women-and-nature mythologies, from classical mythology to fairy tales to contemporary stories. Growing up in Missouri surrounded by evangelical Christians, my work is profoundly influenced by biblical ideas about the darkness of womanhood, celestial displays of power through nature, and Christian eschatology.
My interests in biology, eccentric taxonomies, and collecting are rooted in my past work in natural history museum exhibition design. My study of the natural world though collections led to my fascination with the wildness, humanness, and interconnectedness of nature. A student of museum history, I am particularly fascinated by early modern museums as spaces where science, history, and art can coexist under the umbrella of inquiry, rather than as strictly separate disciplines.
As an avid internet-er and connoisseur of memes and the little-known corners of Youtube, I approach my work the dada-aesthetic and dark sense of humor that dominates internet culture— both for better, and for worse. My image making process begins with strange but true historical facts, excavated through research online, and in libraries and collections. I delve into the strange facts and stories I come across in a way that toes the line between schizophrenic and ecological, creating eccentric taxonomies and making unusual connections. I then collect online photos and physical ephemera from low-brow sites like dollar and thrift stores, Craigslist, and swap meets. My image making process slowly and carefully combines and re-configures my taxonomical found images in Photoshop, creating dense internet-meme-cum-history-paintings. I often translate my digital images into painstakingly handmade paintings and prints, sometimes adding humorous and strange pieces of writing that accompany the images and question their veracity and authority. My sculptural and installation practice looks for broad themes in my collecting, including female sexuality, gender, the lines between collecting and hoarding, absurdity, consumption, and the dark side of the natural world.
As themes emerge, I recombine materials into mysterious and strange
amalgamations, working quickly and intuitively. I also engage with performance, building taxonomies around personal stories and finding humorous and unusual ways to subvert the genres of personal narrative, monologues, and lectures.
By rejecting strict disciplinary boundaries and organizational structures, I blur the lines between dichotomies like truth/fiction, highbrow/lowbrow, and objective/subjective. Thus, my work questions the authority of information as a way of accessing truth in a post-truth world. I de- hierarchize and reconfigure hegemonies including capitalism, patriarchy, Western science and knowledge, and art history to allow secrets and the overlooked the come into sharper focus.
Detail of SPRAWLING NEOBIOTIC CHIMERA (AFTER BANKS' FLORILEGIUM), 2017
