Caterina Sbrana "Private Geography" exhibition, SUF March 25, 2013 (final)
Channel: Syracuse University Florence
Date: 2013-04-22

Studio Arts Department of Syracuse University in Florence on March 25th 2013 successfully presented "Private geography: art as a material epiphany" an exhibit and installation of Caterina Sbrana to a vast audience of students, Florentine artists, critics and international general public. This video is the visual testimony of the event.

For the exhibition, Sbrana has elaborated a site-specific project in the rooms of the Villa Rossa of Syracuse University in Florence, presenting new drawings on Japanese paper as well as an astonishing installation made of turf.
Sbrana's research is an investigation of nature and an interpretation of the natural world made with organic materials that she utilizes for drawing and painting. She often paints with a liquid 'pigment' made from herbs, flowers and roots or a combination of earth and water. For 'Private Geography' she has chosen to work with poppy flower capsules as the material. The result is a beautiful bestiary with images of animals: some jumping out of or into the piece of paper, and some depicted while resting in the ambiguous (dead? just sleeping?) posture of zoomorphic Vanitas.
The clay installation is designed to cover a portion of an elegant wooden floor inside the nineteenth century SUF Villa Rossa. The tiles of dry clay are obtained by making molds of the soil where Sbrana habitually finds the plants and the flowers with which she paints and draws. These traces of mud are conceptually left by her daily walking in and out her own space, writing a sort of journal that narrates the hours spent in thinking and speculating while moving around in a personal geography.


Music:
Lone Harvest, White, Continue Life, The Path of the Goblin King v2 
Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) 
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

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