OPENING ON ITALIAN NATIONAL DAY
On the occasion of Castello Italia, the Italian National Day celebration held at Casa Loma, the Istituto Italiano di Cultura is presenting two art installations by Italian- Canadian artists Francesca Vivenza and Bruno Billio to pay tribute to Canada 150th anniversary.
Opens on Sunday, June 4, 2017 at 10am
It runs through June 25, 2017.
Click here for visitor’s hours.
DESCRIPTION OF INSTALLATIONS
Francesca Vivenza
Tentative Itineraries: ON THE VERGE OF (2017; wood, marine paint; H250 x 98W x 225D cm.)
The installation is located on the left side of the main floor terrace and relates to the castle-like Gothic Revival style of Casa Loma and to the English saying “My house is my castle”.
The work mimics a catapult, or “mangonel”, a wooden construction employed in warfare against fortifications since at least 399 B. C., as the historian Diodorus Siculus writes. During the battle, the catapult faced the walls of the castle: from its long arm missiles of many sorts were ejected over the walls, from stones to body parts, to kill and scare the enemy.
At Casa Loma, the catapult historical warfare position is reversed: it faces the city. On the top of its arm sits the maquette of a house, the icon of stability and traditional values. Here, though, its precarious balance suggests that the house verges between the margin of a place – the top of the arm, or spoon – and the possibility to be launched away. Hence the artist presents On the Verge of both as a menacing catapult and a big toy, which suggests two contradicting concepts: the situation of the house implies instability or an act of force, but conversely, the possibility of the launch invites the viewer to set free of these fears. Thus the artist offers a visual equation of the contradictory nature of human desire: the struggle between assimilation and marginality, complicity and escape.
Francesca Vivenza is a mixed-media artist who lives and works in Toronto. Her works include site-specific installations and artist’s books, that she calls Tentative Itineraries. In her work, Vivenza addresses themes of travel, conquest and displacement and questions the stability of taken for granted sites of personal identity as home, nation and native language.
Born in Rome, Italy, in 1941, Vivenza graduated at the Academy of Fine Arts (Brera), Milan, and has exhibited internationally since 1971. In March, 2017, she has exhibited Tentative Language, a series of works on paper based on a research on the bilingual brain, at Il Gabbiano-Arte Contemporanea, La Spezia, Italy. She is also participating as one of the artists of Central Canada to the Benetton’s project, Imago Mundi, exhibited at Palazzo Loredan, in Venice, Italy, August 29 to October 29, 2017.
http://www.francescavivenza.com
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Bruno Billio
Torre Gialla Nera
The sculpture is inspired by the artist that have exhibited at the Italian Cultural Institute in the past 40 years. Using custom made metal Yellow and Black boxes that are then stacked in an offset manner to give a sense of balance counter balance to a height of 9 ft. One side of each Yellow box will have the surnames of the various artist from the Italian Cultural Institute. The base of the sculpture sits directly on the ground of a heavy black concrete pedestal.
This sculpture represents the many artist and there mediums of the Italian Cultural Institute in a powerful and expressive way. It is ever changing in the natural dynamics of nature, its colour and texture in sunlight, wetness of rain, and the shadows of the night.
Bruno Billio is a Canadian artist working from an interdisciplinary background. At once an installation artist, a sculptor, and a designer, Billio creates challenging works informed by his command of each of these practices. The artist is currently living and working in Toronto, and has been the resident artist at the Gladstone Hotel on Queen West, in the fashionable art gallery district in Toronto, for the past decade. Bruno Billio has exhibited internationally in Milan, London, Miami, New York and Los Angeles.
Bruno Billio’s artistic practice is informed by the active displacement and staging of the found object, a contemporary art strategy with a historically established lineage. The everyday is reinterpreted through its spatial and contextual re-appropriation by the artist, who presents himself by proxy as both an interventionist and an inventor. By de-familiarizing the everyday object, Billio effectively reinterprets the material and social valence of the object in space. Whether it’s the object’s utility or physical context that is thrown into question in his installations, Billio forces the viewer to confront the fragility of material determinism and the utilitarian dictates of the familiar commodity. The conventional use of the commodity is literally evacuated when sculpturally monumentalized as installation.