Amalia Pica: Aula Expandida

In the gallery downstairs, visitors encounter a large room filled with everyday objects that have been turned into chalkboards, and they are invited to pick up a piece of chalk to draw, write, or scribble on all surfaces around them. In Aula Grande (outlined) – Spanish for large classroom – Pica examines the role school plays in imparting a common visual language in our cultural imaginary, and how this way of seeing and thinking accompanies us through the rest of our lives. The installation proposes that we rewrite, redraw, and reimagine alternative narrative possibilities from an expansion of knowledge centered on daily life. By involving visitors in her work, Pica invites both intellectual and physical modes of participation as we are asked to reconsider our surrounding environment as a classroom.

In a new series of colorful embroideries, Pica continues her examination of art and understanding, and how this relationship changes over time. Using drawings made by her young son, Pica and her collaborators painstakingly stitch his quick gestures onto fabric, depicting a pre- representational way of conceptualizing the world around us. She highlights the freedom of expression experienced prior to formal schooling, which ultimately changes our way of seeing and conditions the way we perceive our environment. A deliberate tension between the speed with which the drawings are made and the minute care taken to embroider them exists, embodying the lasting psychological effects of childhood, as well as a parental labor.

A new group of sculptures and collages from an ongoing series focus on the rhetorical device known as catachresis, the application of terms that apply to things that do not have their own word, such as the teeth of a comb, leg of a chair, tongue of a shoe, or elbow of a pipe, often named with human body parts. The extension of a word beyond the limits of its meaning reveals how language and images can interact, contributing to the definition of reality. The result is a group of hybrid figures and images, in anthropomorphic or animal forms, that demonstrate the flexibility of language and its possibly comical consequences.