Artist's Statement
Born into an Italian American family, I was raised Roman Catholic. Though extremely fascinated by the religion, I became incredibly cynical at a young age. Growing up in America, where Heaven has become Hollywood and fundamentalism has replaced enlightenment and money has replaced God, I became a helpless victim of my own culture, forced to believe in the almighty dollar, not Jesus Christ.
In the spring of 2002 while living in Rome, Italy (the central nerve of Catholicism), I became inspired to execute a series of paintings exploring the idea of a contemporary crucifixion. This series combined the iconographic imagery of the crucified Christ with the graphic urban imagery later referred to as “the crowds.”
These crowds, which had begun as a simple sketch, eventually developed into a comment on our society as a whole, abstractly depicting us as star- struck followers, confused and dumb. Two years later that series continued to be the departure point from which I created “The Body of Work: An Installation in Glass and Mixed Media.”
The medium of glass continuously struggles to break free of its rich history as craft and to become completely accepted into the world of fine art. I intentionally used painting, the most accepted of the fine arts, as a format to present my glass. My intentions were for the work to transport the viewer back to the Renaissance in Europe, a period in which the arts flourished, greatly influenced and affected by the Catholic religion, marking our transition from medieval to modern times. Simultaneously, ultramodern urban imagery serves as an unusual backdrop for our normally absent Son of God, resurrected, alive and well among us.