In Person

This exhibition is free to all attending.

Limited space available. To inform us of your wish to attend the exhibition on November 12th, please RSVP below.

—

Saturday November 12th, 2022

address

Highland Park, IL

Address disclosed upon RSVP

hours

11am — 3pm

alexa culioli & randy heller

L I V I N G W I T H A R T : A C O L L A B O R A T I O N

This is my first exhibition in collaboration with an interior designer —Chicago & Highland Park based Randy Heller— who graciously invited me to reinvent her space together with her for this occasion. If you’ve been to my previous exhibition TOTEMS, you know that I make it a point to present not just artwork but an interior that weaves itself in with my artwork.

Randy and I share a specific affinity for interiors. For both of us, an interior isn’t purely a visual experience. Both of us care about an interior that considers everything in it, from the fragrance of the room to the textures involved to the music in the air. An interior is for living in, an environment that makes us feel alive. It must both engage us and bring a peaceful tranquility.

That’s why, for this experience, we worked together to transform the Randy Heller Design House to highlight the five senses. A one-day only event, this collaboration between interior designer Randy Heller and artist Alexa Culioli (yours truly) showcases a new way of living with art beyond what hangs on the walls, involving live musical performance, a scented candle line, visual installations, and light refreshments.

ARTIST statement

F R A G M E N T S

I went to the museum recently and walked through ancient Hellenistic & Greek sculptures. It dawned on me that these sculptures are incomplete —one is missing its nose and a couple fingers, another one lost an entire leg to time. These statues are carefully preserved by art conservators before they are placed in a museum gallery —and no one re-casts the nose or the missing limb. We admire these statues such as they are, incomplete, rescued from the erosion of the elements. We prefer the fragmented sculpture, because time and legacy are more evident that way. In fact, many of these white sculptures were originally full-figures, painted and displayed on a public square. Admiring the altered white marble bits that survived, we get to rewrite the past and romanticise it in this way. It’s our way of keeping our legacy alive: we repurpose what we’ve inherited to fit our current values. The narrative may change with the erosion of the work, but the value of it soars in our minds and hearts.

Continuing my meanderings around timelessness and legacy, the inspiration behind FRAGMENTS comes from interiors that are handed down, worn from wear and tear, lived-in yet precious, making them that much more meditative and valuable. Captivated by dystopian symbols such as the factory, and modern shapes that nod to scarcely preserved brutalist design and bunkers, I look at materials that are forced to change with time. Making use of tinted paper cut outs and copper verdigris, I’ve chosen to create a body of work in honour of these elements that are meant to be subjected to change, in time. 

In Person

Limited space available. To inform us of your wish to attend the exhibition on November 12th, please click below. This exhibition is free to all attending.

—

Saturday November 12th, 2022

11am — 3pm

Address

Highland Park, IL

Disclosed upon RSVP