When the dark world of medieval art and culture was blown open and the humanists stepped out of the rubble with their new single point vision, neo-classical effigies of the Renaissance invaded bucolic Italy and remained the unsurmountable symbol of its cultural significance. The austerity of the cold marble statues depicting rape, and the grimace of bankers’ pet lions are residual narcissisms from a time which disproportionately shaped cultural history, obscuring swaths of inelegant human experience and emotion through its narrow definition of humanity.

 

Drawing from her experience of living in Italy for the past two years, this exhibition is an exploration of clumsy empathy retold through the appropriation of the rich yet cold aesthetic heritage of Italy. In this exhibition, the artefacts of a frigid humanism are degenerated and reconfigured into forms which are shaped by uncomfortable humanness. Objects and images are riddled with frustration toward a prestige aesthetic landscape which is so indifferent and irrelevant to the contemporary hell-scape of the European news cycle.

Pascale Giorgi is a multidisciplinary Australian artist, currently living between Italy and Australia. Drawing on her own cultural identity as an Italo-Australian, totems and concepts of classical culture are subverted through humour and the absurd to arouse scrutiny of nebulous concepts such as culture and authenticity.

 

After graduating from Curtin University in 2015, she has exhibited her work in HATCHED (2016), PICA and Polit(t)ico (2017), Museo Archaeologico Bologna (ITA). Pascale’s practice is underpinned by a fundamental concern with language, and the relationship between concepts, history and lived quotidian experience, influenced by ancient and modern philosophy.