Family Resemblances: Sally Curcio

Some people collect for investment. Some collect for pleasure. Some folks do it to learn about history. And some people "save things" because it helps them to fill a gaping hole, calm fears, erase insecurity. For them, collecting provides order in their lives and a bulwark against the chaos and terror of an uncertain world. It serves as a protectant against the destruction of everything they've ever loved."--Judith Katz-Schwartz

"Clinging is the origin of this entire mass of suffering & stress.”--Buddha

“I can think of no better expression to characterize these similarities than ‘family resemblances’…” --Ludwig Wittgenstein

Sally Curcio’s new body of work, “Family Resemblances,” explores collections of everyday objects through assemblages. “Family Resemblances” refers to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s theory that words cannot be unequivocally defined by clear and specific characteristics, but rather through usage and a “train of associations” (or “family resemblances”) that emerges historically. His theory indicated there is no solid meaning, or essences. Wittgenstein left us with an uncomfortable uncertainty. Curcio explores our need, in the face of this uncertainty, to categorize and collect in an attempt to stabilize meaning.

Curcio shapes these objects into assemblages that evoke our fascination with categorizing and collecting objects, and our bent to be connoisseurs: each work obliges us to compare, contrast, rank, and critique a collection. Curcio’s collections comically summons this impulse into action. The works offers, in a self-consciously naïve way, the self-satisfaction of collecting a “complete” set of objects, and the need for recognition in publicly displaying this triumph. Curcio teaches us that the process of collecting, organizing, and display is a ritual that attempts to create an oasis of certainty, order, and self-identity. Among an array of work on this topic, the three examples below display the aesthetic appeal, cleverness, and depth of her work.

School for Guns

This work displays a motley collection of toy guns ranging in size from "actual" to miniscule. The craftsmanship among the guns varies showcasing the products of numerous toy gun makers. Implicit in the display is a notion of a pack, a group, or school with small, minnow-like guns, through the most authentic imitations. The larger guns are hand guns, and the smaller ones are automatic weapons in a ironic reversal of fire power. The guns seem to almost ascend and grow from some hidden depth.

The name "School of Guns" also suggest the cultural effect of the presence of guns. Guns as toys make harmless the deadly force of these objects, while romanticizing the drama associated with struggles to the death. Media images and the market for toys both spawn and foster these fantasies of struggle for freedom and justice. The link between freedom and violence is memorialized and writ into law in the U.S. Constitution. "School of Guns" speaks to the initiation to this view, its cultivation, growth, and support through social norms.

Eye Candy

"Eye Candy" is a collection of candy dots displayed in five strips. The candy dots spell "eye candy" in Braille. The work is a play on words and the senses. A person who is not blind cannot read the Braille, while a blind person cannot see the colors of the piece. The name is a sexual innuendo regarding a typically male appraisal of an attractive female. Finally: there is the candy itself: available to both male and female, blind and sighted for tasting, but now privileged as art, and thus prevented from being so ingested.

"Eye Candy" is a clever piece that reveals various form of blindness and experience. The work speaks to the challenges of collective experience given barriers of sense, knowledge, cultural status, and convention. It suggests the importance of respecting diversity given our subjective limitations: individually we can only know part of a phenomenon in question. The work demonstrates that through recognition of this limitation, we can open ourselves to alternate interpretations and possibilities.

National Geographic

"National Geographic" presents the spines of over 75 National Geographic magazines. The spines have been cut away from the body of the texts and hang collectively disembodied in random order. The weightiness of the glossy magazine, and the attending weightiness of the knowledge has been excised, leaving nothing but the bindings with the indication of date, volume, and the topics within the now eviscerated magazines.

This piece speaks to the desire for knowledge, the limits of time, and a kind of conscientious hoarding. How painful to throw away these exquisite magazines we may never read! In the past we could capture knowledge in an encyclopedia and enjoy the pleasure of its stolid and complete reference in our homes. This desire for comprehension and wholeness is subverted today by the endless spate of information that envelopes us. However, the desire for this ordered whole remains, and is nicely simulated by Curcio's ruthless decapitation of these volumes.

These three pieces are a sample of Curcio’s work. Her art deliberately confronts us with an alien obsessive attention to precision and order suggesting an unconscious urgency. This translates positively into visually satisfying art that evokes the simplicity and “cleanness” of minimalism, the freshness of op art, and the innocence of folk art. The shapes are simple and satisfying, the colors are bright, the work beautifully neat, and the materials surprisingly familiar, albeit re-contextualized. With these attractive simulated collections the artist has gathered a gallery of artifacts that speaks to our perpetual drive to somehow, in some way, take control and make sense of things.