» gaialight

Gaialight was born in Rome in 1973. Italo-American, Gaia spends her time between Rome and New York; in New York, she is presently working on her new artistic projects: light projects, as her stage name suggests. Light, as her sense of perception: to render "light" even the most difficult, painful and dramatic aspects of contemporary society. Even those which are simply vulgar or trash.

With her beginning cycle, Light (2004), and then Can (2005) and Light TV (2006), the artist challenges the system of contemporary icons thrust upon us by the mass media, burdened with all kinds of ideological furor. Images of horror, or only bad taste, seen daily, perversely end up peddling even the most violent trash for amusement; crudeness and vulgarity, for irony.

The artist performs an operation which is inverse and subversive. She re-utilizes, recycles, devours and re-elaborates the garbage, the heavy and poisonous waste of contemporary imagery to return it to innocuous, but by no means innocent, consumption.

Gaialight presents the items and images of everyday use, and contaminates them; destabilizing each certainty, revealing each taboo. And she does so with a smile on her lips. Astuteness of art to obtain a glance and the attention of the observer, his spontaneous participation which has the collateral effect of inevitable reflection. Gaialight produces works which propose themselves as an antidote to the poison and vulgarity that surrounds us. And it is not, obviously, only a question of content.

Working with a collage, artisan and skillfully prepared, Gaialight explores the potential expressiveness of everyday items (cigarette lighters, cans, television sets, etc.), contaminating them with a flow of images taken from the mass media and with iconography which is both pop and anti-pop at the same time (protagonists of the international star system, personalities from the political/social, artistic, imaginary and, in any case, mass media world).

Thus an original objet d'art is born, to be assembled with other originals by content, chromatics, affinity or contrast, and then photographed.

The photographic set is the moment in which Gaialight, starting from the universe that she herself has created, transforms the transitory gesture of combining the original elements into their permanent form to be reproduced photographically.

The artist uses language and technique intended for a wide audience, aimed at reaching everyone, even the least sophisticated; a dimension only apparently pop in which Max Ernst cohabits with Andy Wahrol.

After the Light and Can series where collages were composed of images taken from newspapers and magazines, in the Light TV series the artist still works with collages but only with original material created by herself and re-elaborated by digital graphics.

Gaialight creates original objects which she transforms by the most advanced digital techniques into images printed in very limited editions.