#semiwild

Come for You (Still Life), acrylic on paper, 22”x30”, 2013

SEMI-WILD Paintings by Mia Fiorentino On view May 29 - June 22, 2014 Reception: Thursday, June 5, 7pm - 9pm

"I look at my work as a kind of orchestration or theatrical space, and I seem to always begin by creating some sort of horizon line. With this starting point I set the scene for a kind of ambiguous landscape, and as I work it can become anything from a tightly localized setting like a bedroom, to a vast and generalized mountainside. Often, as I set up this indistinct pastoral landscape, a human or urban presence will make its way into the foreground. Semi‐Wild, to me, is where the power of the natural world and the man‐made, urban world meet and how I find myself between the two.

There are usually elements of nature suggested within my paintings, like an animal presence, rolling hills, flowers, or raindrops. These hints of nature are often introduced into the work through the use of patterning. And if that is not the case, the forces of nature already present are forced to meet with the intrusion of the predictable patterning of something like banal bed sheets. And while these images are the product of a kind of mechanized repetition, there is always interruption of the human hand that breaks down the pattern. The work suggests contemporary material culture simply through how it is made, through a combination of grimy confusion and clean, plastic flatness.

The push and pull in subject matter, materials, and my role as a kind of composer result in detached observations of “the state of things” colliding with highly personal visual confessions of my own experiences. The pieces are a dramatized and often wry depiction of how I view my relationship to my surroundings and the culture in which I take part. Through the work I am trying to dissect what it means to feel as though I belong somewhere in between the urban and pastoral spaces that I depict, and what my relationship is to the objects and characters that I create to inhabit them."