May 2015 – September 2015
Marso is pleased to present Movement Toward Definition, Tony Orrico’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. This exhibition includes a new series of drawings, organic sculptures, and two videos. All works are sourced from the body through the artist’s use of organized consciousness and performative structures to ge-nerate material and moving images. Orrico’s own movement practice becomes the object of his inquiry as he investigates more of the underlying phenomenology and obscure distances drawn in his work. A deeper sense of manipulated gesture arises in this show to bend polarities between the temporal and the transformation toward other, so much that ends meet on the other side.
These offerings at once inflate and deflate what they attempt to define; lost in infinite potential, they meander with integral focus between kinesthetic and psychological experiences. Sketch-like qualities mirror constant vibration and line derives both by the body sensing at the receptive level and by the will of cognition. Orrico’s newest drawings (MTD 010 – 070) and other choreographic actions etch into neutral space, bury trace, hyper-recover, repopulate, and deviate unabashedly. His allowance for handedness to fluctuate between bi-lateral, dominant and nondominant initiations stirs surface area into grey topographies of harmony and dissonance.
Objects coated with Sri Lankan graphite (Standing Knobby Starfish, 2015 and Untitled, 2014) rest as charged, pseudo-petrified relics while a tessellation of hand printed memories (Textile: SELJAVALLALAUG SWIM, 2015) in appearance intersects algorithmic code and a mounted, ancient textile. He employs a unique iteration of carbon, activated carbon fabric (Suspension Field, 2015) which offers a virtual, infinite breadth of planar surface based on its inherent physical properties.
Orrico satisfies a personal affinity through appropriation and tribute (Accelerated Image: Yvonne Rainer’s Hand Movie (1966), 2014). He writes:
“Rainer’s disembodied hand appears to function autonomously; it deciphers its own direction through time and space with no auxiliary conductors. There is no relationship to an environment or other objects to reference scale. The image sustains its disorientation to any/everything else, and appears larger than life. To a determined eye, the improvised gestures are overwhelmingly complex in their subtly. At first I wanted to learn all of its intricacy merely for the feat. Overtime, the moving image became archetype to me, symbol of an artist’s hand– of my own hand. I wished to perpetuate this image by rotating perspective, and through radial and reflective symmetry– so that it is no longer a memory to us, but rather, we become memories to it.”
