In Bocca al Lupo

Romer Young Gallery is pleased to present its seventh solo exhibition with artist Amanda Curreri. “In Bocca al Lupo” features a new series of textile-based artworks with a focus on the talismanic. The exhibition continues Curreri’s ongoing inquiry into the intersections of material studies, visual culture, and collective futurity.

The exhibition title, “In Bocca al Lupo,” comes from the Italian idiom meaning “good luck” or more directly: “Go into the mouth of the wolf!” The customary reply being, “Kill it!,” or, Crepi il Lupo! Summoning a willful resolve in the face of our global doomsday reality, the title serves as a touchstone for the exhibition. Individual artworks take their titles from a range of cultural idioms: ¡Mucha Mierda! in Spanish, Toi Toi Toi (said aloud it sounds like three spits – to ward off bad luck), Ganbatte in Japanese, and more. Blending belief, superstition, and study within a formal canvas of furry yarns, energetic color, gestural mark-making, textile design structures, and photographic sources, the results are a personal archive of work that intimately relates to the artist’s search for community and survival in an increasingly hegemonic world.

Much of Curreri’s work is made in the spirit of a cento. Latin for “patchwork garment,” a cento is a literary work composed of verses from a range of disparate authors. The work in the exhibition was handwoven across a range of looms – floor looms, table-top looms, and TC2 digital Jacquard looms. Digital Jacquard weaving is a form of computer assisted hand-weaving that offers a groundbreaking shift for Curreri allowing her artwork to now accommodate ancient techniques (such as hand weaving and dyeing) as well as the contemporary imprint of digitally translated imagery. Engaged with textiles’ persistence as a social technology, Curreri’s generative work represents spaces of collective possibility, actively enacting ideas rather than simply being about them. Curreri shares, “I’m finding the digital loom capable of producing a convergence of image, histories, technology, and a beautifully stubborn insistence of the body.”