Beyond the Veil: Exploring the Tensions Between
It is perhaps most interesting, the possibilities that exist in the spaces between. Between thoughts, between questions, between reality and the things beyond. In that suspended place of tension is the beginning of newness, the birth of novel thought and perhaps a kind of resilient peace given form by hope and a curious calling to explore.
Beyond the Veil: Exploring the Tensions Between is a solo exhibition with artist Bianca Valencia Criscuolo that envisions a thread between her diverse body of works, founded on the idea that each series in some way explores a tension between, a place of juxtaposition and inquiry.
Origins is one of Criscuolo’s most developed series and finds foothold in the tension between future and present cosmology, expanding on the idea that our ancestors asked very different questions about the universe than contemporary humanity. While we are burdened with the question of HOW humans and the universe were made, the central cosmological question for ancient humans was nearly always WHY were we made. The series finds its tension and play in Criscuolo’s desire to explore these contrasting questions as they push back on her personal belief, spirituality and concept of reality.
It is in the dark where consciousness dissolves, and one dances most intimately with dream and spirit. Criscuolo’s illustrative work explores beneath the veil of waking life, where symbols whisper, landscapes shift, and figures flit up from the subconscious. Ink strokes give physicality to the depths of the mind, where verity, discovered truth and forgotten memories intertwine with archetypal forms and echoed prophecies from the divine.
The Muse’s body of work traverses the question of ethics in artistry as it relates to idolatry and objectification, in contrast with love, appreciation and the existence of a muse. Can you have a muse without objectifying and idolizing the subject? Where is the line between appreciation of beauty and objectification?
Observations of Silence is most simply observing what is birthed within the space between intentional silence and the self. What is found in conscious meditative quiet?
Elohim is Criscuolo’s first series that followed a period of not painting for three years. The piece "Inevitable Redemption" began the Elohim series, which then expanded concurrently with Origins. Elohim takes a theological approach to depicting the essence of heavenly beings, meant to spark conversation around historical interpretations of angelic beings, contrasted by scriptural accuracy cited through her studies of Ezekiel.
