To celebrate my new found singledom, it only seemed right that I would attend the "Love is a Four Letter Word" Art Exhibit at the Foley Gallery in Chelsea. I love art to death and when you throw in some wine and cheese, a grand opening event, and Wall-street types, it absolutly sounds like an evening to remember. The exhibit opens this Friday (when I plan to attend) and tickets can be bought online. Dress is trendy/upscale and the event starts at 7pm. I'll report on how it goes. Oh, how so Charlottle of me!
More about the exhibit:
The exhibition Love is a Four Letter Word will coincide with Slash: Paper Under the Knife at the Museum of Arts and Design, which will include the cut paper work of Mastrovito. Foley Gallery will also feature three artists from the Slash exhibition, Tom Gallant, Daniel Alcalá, and Rob Carter, in the project gallery.
In his new series entitled, Love is a Four Letter Word, Mastrovito uses his vibrant collages to examine the nuanced and complex nature of love. For Mastrovito, love is a treacherous cycle that begins with innocence, followed by a violent initiation (represented as death), and then begins again in a sort of beautiful rebirth. The cycle is conveyed via a large frieze, which will wrap around the gallery space, sequenced so that each piece is a connected part of this narrative whole. He articulates the themes of this narrative through an overt symbolism. Innocent figures are shown in white, wielding guns, while the ‘victims’ of love, once shot, become colorful embodiments of love itself, expressed by his use only of the letters L-O-V-E in their construction. These figures drown in a sea of L-O-V-E only to be reborn or rebuilt as new individuals. The white and the colored figures emerge in various incarnations in each separate work, while on the whole, as the frieze evolves, innocence fades and love grows.
The exhibition’s use of “love,”the word, the symbol, involves a deconstruction through repetition, which exposes the quality, meaning, and intricacy of the experience and process of love.
There comes a point in every little girl's life when she graduates from dog-earing pages in the annual Toys 'R' Us Christmas Catalog, to dog-earing the pages in the annual Neiman Marcus Catalog.
