Grotesques
"Grotesques" is a new series of video installations inspired by a deep study of the Alessandro Allori frescoes on the ceiling of the artists' corridor in the Uffizi Museum, Florence, and in the Roman Fourth period paintings on which they are based, found throughout archeological sites in Italy. I am interested in the symmetry, formal order, and decorative language of these paintings as they warehouse categories of beauty, possession, human frailty, exploits, and monsters. They tell stories. In this “Grotesques” series, I explore some elisions of space influenced by these ancient Roman paintings and I animate the frescoes with my own content. I imagine these Allori works also held local social commentary like Boccaccio's Decameron, lost to us now. My goals are social critique, transformation of space, and decorative subversion of surface and desire.