SUSAN CIANCIOLO
if God COMes to visit You, HOW will you know? (the great tetrahedral kite)
May 17–July 5 2015
BRIDGET DONAHUE
99 BOWERY 2ND FLOOR,
NEW YORK, NY 10002 USA
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Susan Cianciolo
Deluxe Accessories Kit
2001-2010
Silk triangle bag, glitter, paper, cotton tapestry necklace or wall-hanging, dye and acrylic on canvas sneakers, cotton woven shawl, cotton bow tie, 2-sided offset printed poster, Run 11 Shiseido makeup bag on cotton patchwork textile with fabric by Mike Mills
4 x 25 x 30 inches (10.16 x 63.50 x 76.20 cm)
Photo by Sam Franklin
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Susan Cianciolo
Hologram Box Kit
2009-2015
Ink and Pencil on paper, drawings from Space 1520 presentation, digital print photographs by Wallace Lester on cardboard shapes, artist tape on textile printed by Mike Mills
6 x 13.5 x 21 inches (15.24 x 34.29 x 53.34 cm)
Unique
Photo by Sam Franklin
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Susan Cianciolo
Star Textile Book Kit
2000-2015
Cloth textile stark kit, cardboard paper star mobile on Run 11 collage
4 x 12.5 x 16 inches (10.16 x 31.75 x 40.64 cm)
Unique
Photo by Sam Franklin
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Susan Cianciolo
Sacred Geometry Kit
2010-2015
Cardboard, 2010 animation drawings, artist tape on paper quilt from Angels Do Exist
8.5 x 16.5 x 27.5 inches (21.59 x 41.91 x 69.85 cm)
Unique
Photo by Sam Franklin
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Susan Cianciolo
Sacred Geometry Kit
2010-2015
Cardboard, 2010 animation drawings, artist tape on paper quilt from Angels Do Exist
8.5 x 16.5 x 27.5 inches (21.59 x 41.91 x 69.85 cm)
Unique
Photo by Sam Franklin
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Susan Cianciolo
Installation View, Performance Still
Photo by Claire McKinney
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Susan Cianciolo
Compliment to Mini Me Box, 1990-2015
Photo by Harry Hughes
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Susan Cianciolo
Installation View, Performance Still
Photo by Claire McKinney
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Susan Cianciolo
Installation View
Photo by Claire McKinney
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Susan Cianciolo
Installation View, Performance Still
Photo by Claire McKinney
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Susan Cianciolo
DIY T-Shirt Kit, 1998-2015
Photo by Harry Hughes
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Susan Cianciolo
Installation View, Performance Still
Photo by Claire McKinney
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Bridget Donahue opened the gallery’s second solo exhibition on Sunday May 17th with new works from multi-media artist and designer Susan Cianciolo. The exhibition is accompanied by a selection of the artist’s costumes and archival material organized by Alex Fleming.
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For the past twenty years, Susan Cianciolo has moved between fields and formats—from fashion to craft, from performance to filmmaking—and the works presented in if God COMes to visit You, HOW will you know? (the great tetrahedral kite) speak to this restlessness. Cianciolo has produced a body of work that willfully evades categorization, exploiting the false dichotomies of construction and deconstruction, art and design, event and document. This exhibition offers a glimpse into the material flux of an archive being unbuilt in an ongoing and endless process of reformulation.
The material unit of Susan Cianciolo’s installation is a vessel: in the artist’s vocabulary, a “kit.” For each kit, the artist has reworked, painted over, gathered, and torn apart clothing, soft sculpture, drawing, painting, and collage pulled from the past two decades of her practice. The recombinant vessels on view evidence an impatience with personal relics, yet they also yield something that is distinctly contemplative, personal, and sacred in character. Cianciolo chose to have her artworks photographed by a friend or collaborator, fully following through to how each kit reflects a form of lived practice, personal study, and devotional investment. The works possess a spiritual and emotional weight akin to a journal or scrapbook. The kits duly measure hours of material and physical labor at the same time that they capture their contents as documentary objects.
The exhibition also features a selection of handmade books that elaborate upon the artist’s approach to live performance. Among them are zines made for the twelve fashion collections Cianciolo produced under the moniker “Run” between 1995 and 2001. A considerable oeuvre in their own right, Cianciolo's books function as 2-D analogs to the artist’s kits, emerging from the same cannibalizing force and engaging a similar scale and handheld relation to the body. Yet, where the kits evoke a complex of possible narratives, the books tether themselves to a single performative event, anchored by photography and collage.
Accompanying these artifacts are a selection of costumes and clothing which, like the rest of the exhibition, bear witness to Cianciolo's propensity toward group collaboration, and experimentation but also echo formal concerns which have been her signature since her first presentations.
—Alex Fleming
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An exhibition catalog published by Nieves and a suite of posters designed by Harsh Patel with Susan Cianciolo will be printed on occasion. A series of live events and programs will include: a presentation of Cianciolo's early films selected by Asher Penn, an illustrated lecture by Barbara Moore on “The Fashion Show Poetry Event, New York, 1969;” and Mark Von Schlegell and Sophie Von Olfers will reanimate a production, in homage to Jack Smith: Hamlet, Mise-en-scène; by Städelschule Pure Fiction Seminar Imagining Being Trained in Reptilian Acting Technique, staged at Portikus, Frankfurt, December 2012 for which Cianciolo developed costumes. Dates and details forthcoming.
Susan Cianciolo (b. 1969, Providence, RI) studied Fashion Design at Parsons The New School for Design and painting at Winchester School of Art. Cianciolo began her career as production manager for Kim Gordon's X-girl line and went on to be assistant collection designer at Badgley Mischka. From 1995–2001 she produced her critically-acclaimed collection RUN, revived in recent years in various forms. Cianciolo has presented her work at in New York at Alleged Gallery, P.S.1 Museum, Andrea Rosen, Sears-Peyton, Maryam Nassir Zadeh, and Ralph Pucci Gallery among others; Internationally at Pitti Immagine Discovery and Kaufmann Repetto, Italy; Purple Institute and Deep Gallery, France; Gallery 360, Presspop, Marugame Genichiro-Inokuma Museum of Contemporary Art, Japan; MMK Museum fur Modern Kunst and Portikus, Frankfurt, Germany. Her work has been featured in publications such as: The New York Times, T Magazine, Vogue, Visionaire, Interview, i-D magazine, Self-Service, Index, Artforum, Hanatsubaki, Vice, Vestoj and Purple amongst others.
* All images are Courtesy of the artist and Bridget Donahue, NYC