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"LIGHT TREATMENT" München 2008
DRISSIEN GALERIE
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GAIALIGHT - LIGHT TREATMENT
DRISSIEN GALERIE
Romerstr. 9, München
June 5 - July 5, 2008

mon 3pm - 6pm
tue-fri 11am-2pm/3pm-7pm
sat 11am-2pm

Opening reception
Thursday 5 June, 7 pm
KUNSTPRAXIS der SIEMENS AG
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GAIALIGHT LIGHT TREATMENT
KUNSTPRAXIS der SIEMENS AG
Wittelsbacherplatz 2, München June 3 - August 31, 2008

Opening reception
Tuesday 3 June, 6 pm
"LIGHT TREATMENT" München 2008

Curator:
Tiziana Gazzini

Proposed and organized by
La coda dell'occhio - Cultural Association-Italy
Pro Arte e V. - Cultural Association-Germany


Supported by:
Planet LIfe Economy Foundation

"kunStart 08"
MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY ART
GAIALIGHT
5th INTERNATIONAL MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY ART FAIR OF BOLZANO
Gaialight presents the new series "USA Can",
Drissien Galerie - Munich, Stand 21

May 22 - 25, 2008

"STARLIGHT IN NEW YORK"
Homage to Tribeca Film Festival
GAIALIGHT - Starlight in New York
Homage to Tribeca Film Festival
Curator
Tiziana Gazzini

Critical Apparatus
GK/Agence'X'
Opening reception
Thursday 24 April, 6-8 pm

Nancy Koltes at Home
31 Spring Street, New York

The show will run
from April 25 through May 24

Proposed by
Nancy Koltes and La coda dell'occhio - Cultural Association

Supported by
Italian Cultural Institute, New York

ARTE CONTEMPORANEA"
Electa Mondadori
Gaialight in Arte Contemporanea

edited by Electa Mondadori
Volume Nine Contaminazioni

Gaialight with Rear Window can
(2007 – original installation: mixed media on tin can)

in Arte Contemporanea
(eleven volumes, Electa Mondadori)
Volume Nine - Contaminazioni
Chapter - Cinema
on the newstands in Italy beginning Friday February 29, 2008
with L’Espresso-Repubblica

The original installation is part of the cycle Light Treatment soon to shown in Germany for the artist’s solo exhibition at the Drissien Galerie, Munich (June 5 – July 5, 2008).

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STARLIGHT IN NEW YORK
Homage to Tribeca Film Festival
 
with the support of the
Italian Cultural Institute of New York
 
Nancy Koltes at Home, 31 Spring Street, New York
Opening reception Thursday, April 24, 6-8 pm
The show will run from April 25 through May 24. 2008

Curator: Tiziana Gazzini
Critical Apparatus: GK/Agence‘X’
Proposed by:
Nancy Koltes and La coda dell’occhio - Cultural Association

 
The exhibition Starlight in New York by the artist Gaialight, curated by Tiziana Gazzini, with the support of the Italian Cultural Institute of New York, will be held from April 25 to May 24, 2008 at the Nancy Koltes at Home store (www.nancykoltesathome.com) in New York.
The exhibition, proposed by the cultural association La coda dell’occhio, in collaboration with the GK / Agence ‘X’, is a homage to the Tribeca Film Festival (April 23 – May 4) by the Italo-American artist Gaialight, who works with icons of mass culture, dedicating particular attention to the cinema.

Gaialight, who lives and works between New York and Europe (her next exhibition will be inaugurated on June 5 at the Drissien Galerie, Munich, Germany), is the first artist to whom the stylist Nancy Koltes, number one in home fashions, opens one of her elegant stores. This artistic initiative combines cinema, fashion and culture and affirms the Italo-American creativity that contributed to the success of her griffe and her style, because it was precisely in Italy, in Como, during the ‘90’s, that Nancy began to produce her elegant household linens.

Twenty-five three dimensional collages will be exhibited on Spring Street, all realized with mixed media techniques on one of Gaialight’s favorite objects: maxi-cans, on which the artist tells a story through pictures, with refined optical effects and ironic thematic juxtapositions. Protagonists are films and great stars of the international cinema tied to the city of New York and the collective imagination of the American and Italo-American cinema: Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy, the Lolitas, Sue Lyon, Jody Foster e Mina Suvari, Woody Allen’s Manhattan, and John Travolta’s Brooklyn in Saturday Night Fever and Alberto Sordi in Un americano a Roma; Sex and the City and a surreal telephone conversation between Mia Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby and a character from the Muppet Show.

Some cans are expressly dedicated to sleep, or to dreams, like the dream-like close-up of Bob De Niro clouded in opium fumes in Sergio Leone’s masterpiece Once upon a Time in America or Audrey Hepburn-Holly’s sleep scene in Breakfast at Tiffany’s or the Science of Sleep. Faces, places, words which Gaialight trasforms into form, signs and color to give life to works which are pleasant, or light, as is her stage name, but which are also profound, sarcastic and poetic. The exhibit includes two of the artist’s historical works, the Girls and Hom panels, mosaics of some of the greatest female and male stars of motion picture history, from Marlon Brando to Grace Kelly, in a new version realized expressly for the New York exhibition.

A homage to the Tribeca Film Festival visualizing cinema as a dream dreamed by everybody together (Jean Cocteau). Cinema not as a show, but as one of the fine arts, as the critic and essayist, GK/ Agence ‘X’, reminds us in the essay Art as such: this is Not Pop written on the occasion of the exhibition.

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Light Treatment, Roma design più
Rome, Spazio Etoile Piazza San Lorenzo in Lucina 41
5-13 October 2007
Opening Reception Friday, October 5, 2007, 6.00pm
Meeting with the artist, Friday, 12 October at 8 pm.

Curator:
Tiziana Gazzini
Organization:Cultural Association
La coda dell’occhio
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The only artist invited to take part in the Festival with the Trattamento Light/Light Treatment exhibition, Gaialight will present her most recent cycle of work in which she has applied her usual artistic techniques (collage, photographs, installations) to disability aids. The cycle, realized in New York in 2007, has a vaguely medical-sounding title: Treatment, since the artist has subjected crutches, walking frames, hearing aids and other items used to facilitate the everyday lives of the disabled, to her unique form of therapy, her treatment, transforming them into postpop objects. The result is a surprising redesign effect which goes beyond the art/design dialectic, exploring what is meant by disability and what is meant by aid. In this exhibition, Gaialight fights with light violence against the violence of disability and the violence – which at times is no less ferocious – of aids. And the artist’s understanding of disability is not limited to the physical sort. Are sexual impotence and depression serious disabilities within a society where everyone is required to be attractive and happy? Viagra, Prozac et al are the official "aids" used to combat these disabilities in the western world. And so Gaialight gives a Viagra and Prozac-style treatment to crutches, making them into surreal, poetic works of art, eloquent and undeniably rebellious. A series of themed art works dealing with modern-day disabilities – physical, mental, political – and their remedies, will be on display at the Spazio Etoile. In some of these, Gaialight identifies disability, holding it up as an example and revealing it for what it is, in others she sets forth her treatment, where possible describing an antidote and paying homage to her great passions: the cinema and cartoons, pop culture and mass icons, the heroes and anti-heroes of history and politics, art and fashion. As in previous exhibitions dedicated to lighters (Light 2004), tin cans (Can 2005) and televisions (Light TV 2006), Gaialight once again offers a photographic exploration of the new art worlds of her own creation. Along with the original objects, the exhibition in Rome will include photos taken by the artist, laying bare the very anatomy of her work, deconstructing/reconstructing through images both angry and decorative. Pleasing and frightening.
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Gaialight was interviewed on her Light Treatment cycle by Kathryn B. Heisinger, Curator of European Decorative Arts at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Kathryn B. Hiesinger has supervised, amongst others, the Designing Modern: 1920 to the Present exhibition, currently being held in Philadelphia (15 September 2007 - Spring 2008).


Light Treatment
an interview to Gaialight
by Kathryn B. Hiesinger

"(…) why shouldn’t Chanel sell
pink branded crutches to stylish clients
who need them, and why in general,
as the artist asks, does medical equipment
merit so little aesthetic consideration?"

Kathryn B. Hiesinger


I recently interviewed Gaialight about her new work, “Light Treatment ” , which will be exhibited at Rome’s fifth international design fair, “Roma Design Piu’,” in October 2007. Building on her neo-Pop conceptual photo-collages of Coca-Cola cans, first shown in Rome at the Galleria Santa Cecilia in 2005, Gaia continues to use the visual language of pop art – its cartoon graphics, flatness, references to commercial art, and contradictions of scale and context – for her socio-political messages. In “Light Treatment,” Gaia applies comic and popular images and microtexts to tools for the disabled, among them, crutches, canes, hearing aids and walkers. These objects can be literally read, but also remain functional, if highly decorated tools. Accenting the densely decorated surfaces of these tools are heart-shaped stickers, a nod to the continuing pre-teen fondness for stickers, but also an ironic comment on the images they embrace.

Each decoration is thematically composed, most in the exhibition speaking directly to issues of physical or mental disability. Superman and Wonder Woman suggest the strength of the disabled as well as the freedom and power those with disabilities may have lost. Mona Lisa, a universal symbol of beauty, is also subversively photomontaged with other faces, including a scary Jack Nicholson from the film “The Shining,” and Uma Thurman in “Pulp Fiction.” Glamorous logos create glamorous-looking tools: hot-pink Chanel and Ferrari among others, “are powerful images,” according to the artist, “because of the contrast and contradiction of dramatically ugly aids to fancy, upscale brands.” Yet still, on a purely functional level, why shouldn’t Chanel sell pink branded crutches to stylish clients who need them, and why in general, as the artist asks, does medical equipment merit so little aesthetic consideration? Another piece is decorated with sumptuous blue Pfizer/Viagra pills and sticker hearts, another with Prozac capsules and the Statue of Liberty, their messages of freedom and recovered ability ringing loud and clear. One crutch is decorated with “Cherry,” a character from Quentin Tarantino’s film, “Grindhouse,” whose bionic leg serves as a weapon. There is also Wheelchair Barbie (actually “Share a Smile Becky,” a Barbie doll in a wheelchair introduced by Mattel in 1997) and a walker dedicated to film characters with disabilities, from James Stewart in “Rear Window,” to Heidi’s friend Clara and Almodovar’s “Lydia” in “Habla con ella.”

A number of the works are more purely political statements, “bringing up things which are particularly urgent at this time in our history,” said the artist, “and in a metaphorical way, need to be ‘cured’ (they all seem to need an ‘aid’).” An old Palestinian map decorates one crutch, the map completed with flags and symbols as well as repeated “No War” signs; below are Muppets Statler and Waldorf, “arguing as always,” Gaia noted, “repeating the same things without reaching a solution.” Another crutch is prisoner-themed, from Paris Hilton to Guantanamo Bay.

Born and educated in Rome, Gaia is now working in New York. Wherever she may be, Gaialight is certainly a young artist to watch.


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diid disegno industriale industrial design is the bimonthly magazine of innovation and research directed by Tonino Paris, edited by Redesignpress
via Angelo Brunetti, 42, 00186 Rome - 0039063225362
This work by the Italo-American artist Gaialight was realized for the exhibition Roma Design più (5 – 14 October 2007) and proposes a collage of images and microtexts on an object of industrial design for mass consumption: the can. Gaialight utilizes also in this case the collage technique, producing single works, which are then assembled, photographed front/back and printed in limited editions.
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SOTTOTERRA 02
Rome, Italy, 20 April - 12 May 2007
Examples of Urban Art, "Homage to Mario Schifano"
STUDIO GIGA
“Homage to Mario Schifano” organized by Studio Giga - Barbara Martusciello and Matteo Peretti curators - presents Alessio Facchini, Gaialight, Maseda, Salvatore Mauro, Valentino Menghi, Matteo Peretti, Serpe in seno, Stella Tasca, Wladimir Vinciguerra. And, of course, Mario Schifano, with two sixties works. Gaialight honors Schifano by presenting two works from the  Light TV series (2006) - Oriana & friends and PsychoTV - and the installation  The Wall (6x16=96 cans) from the Can series (2005).
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Two works by Mario Schifano from the 60's (an ESSO and a Coca Cola) and three works by Gaialight (Psycho TV, The Wall--installation, Oriana & friends) on exhibition at the Studio Giga.