Everything’s Coming Up AdrienneRoses will open at the Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum on Wednesday, April 23rd, during its FrostArt Wednesday After Hours. The exhibition includes work by AdrienneRose Gionta, who will receive her Master of Fine Arts this Spring 2014 from the FIU Department of Art + Art History.
Gionta is an interdisciplinary artist and curator from Brooklyn. She earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts with a minor in psychology from Florida Atlantic University, where she is now the Assistant Director of its University Galleries. Gionta has exhibited at Art Basel-Miami Beach, the Art and Culture Center of Hollywood, David Castillo Gallery, Girls’ Club, and Armory Art Center. Her work is in the private collection of Francie Bishop Good and David Horvitz, and also in the collection of the Florida Atlantic University Department of Visual Arts & Art History.
MFA Candidate Andrew Horton wrote the following piece about Gionta’s new solo exhibition, Everything’s Coming Up AdrienneRoses, at the FIU Frost Art Museum.
Within gaming, the avatar is a player’s representation through which they explore new places and perform roles they cannot in their daily lives: warrior, architect, zombie hunter, and so on. In those spaces, the rules of life are bent or suspended, and the player decides who they are in this realm. Like the gamer, the artist has the ability to suspend rules to explore new realities.
These works are avatars much like characters in a game. They represent an idealized form of their author, not in their appearance, but in the worlds they inhabit. Rather than crafting a false presentation in a virtual world, Gionta creates places where she can manifest the life she wants, freed from the burden of preconceived roles that have been assigned to her. Her avatars do not change to meet conventional standards; she bends the world. She creates parallel universes in which her aunt is able to attend art school and her own desires play in the form of alternate versions of herself. The “big girl” can be the star and spring is perpetual. Gionta invites the viewer in as a guest in both her physical and mental space. Her own furniture is positioned in the gallery allowing visitors to sit comfortably, converse, and pause to consider the world from her vantage. By creating these parallel universes, she suggests that a world in which a person can be judged by their character rather than by negative preconceptions about body shape or gender is the same one in which trapping poltergeists can be a day job.
The message is bittersweet but the sweet is magnified to excess. AdrienneRose Gionta does not mourn the loss of an idealized world, but basks joyfully in defiance of cynicism.
The opening reception for Everything’s Coming Up AdrienneRoses by AdrienneRose Gionta will take place on Wednesday, April 23rd, 2014 from 6PM-9PM at the FIU Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum: 10975 SW 17th Street, Miami, FL 33199. Free and open to the public.
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