, is an artist whose work delves into societal issues through the lens of her 

. She offers an unfiltered critique of political, economic, and social systems, employing a diverse range of mediums, including painting, sculpture, photography, architecture, design, psychology, performance, and activism. While pursuing her Master's in Fine Arts at Columbia University in New York, she was profoundly influenced by her professors 

, shaping the direction of her artistic practice. 

I was born in 1986 and have experienced firsthand the powerlessness that is a recurrent theme for my generation. From the 2008 economic collapse to the 2020 Coronavirus pandemic, millennial adulthood is a story of disappointed expectations. While acknowledging the hurt that these crises have caused, I also see these events as an opportunity to re-evaluate faulty systems and to purge the repressed secrets, anxieties, and systemic injustices that brought us to this point of governmental and economic collapse. I also challenge the underlying moral beliefs that continue to motivate damaging ways of life—for example, the fetishization of hard work.


When you ask Basso Pietrobon about the core of her practice, she explains: "I am not afraid of using my practice as an outlet for emotion—and many of my projects are geared towards uncovering human psychology and motivations. I aim to reimagine society’s structure and relationship with wealth through critical works that envision and enact supportive, women-led leadership models within the arts and, hopefully, the world at large. I use projects such as Dimmi, Amore and The Fondamenta to turn the system on itself and spread. Ultimately, I see my works as sites of encounter, open invitations to my viewer to reinvent themselves and the world around them. I perform the drama of life so that my viewers can see their own lives more clearly and feel less alone. Do you see me? Do you feel me? Do you hear me? Do you receive me? Do you see yourself? Do you find yourself? Are you witnessing yourself?"

 Sarah Sze said "you had such a unique past working in architecture, fashion, dance, and lighting -- and since all these are a form of art, I want to see you mix all these fields together rather than keeping them separate."  That advice gave Basso Pietrobon the courage to focus on mixing these fields, and allowed her to believe that she had to go where space was. As difficult as it was to leave New York, I put my practice first and left the city for a very small town an hour away from Venice -- because her distant relative offered her space in his closed down ceramic factory.

Rirkrit Tiravanija taught me the importance of community, offering social spaces for people to gather, think, and perhaps even make. This inspired The Fondamenta, and other projects such as Seasonal (Sow, Sew & So), and Bella Ciao.

Many of my works repurpose discarded materials which vary from high-quality scraps of cashmere and marble to corroded pipes and rusted rotor discs. By giving these scraps a second life, I turn consumer culture on its head. A significant part of my use of these materials is understanding the cycle of their creation and consumption. I visit factories, learn about product histories, and spend months researching the raw materials. This process also entails collaboration—working with factory owners and employees, learning from their experiences and embodied knowledge allows me to bring the important conversation of the factory and sustainable production into the realm of art. The intention of my work is to open discussion for us all to be responsible for the affects on the planet, from the way we farm to the way we produce products, and consume – for us to think of the circular economy. I look to the future with hope, believing that we as humanity will support the planet so she can regain her health and balance.

My work registers a push-and-pull with my family legacy. I embrace the material knowledge imparted by my grandparents and parents who worked in ceramics, product design, stonemasonry, construction, textiles, acting, teaching, and entrepreneurship. I also draw heavily upon my Italian roots and, after relocating to Italy in 2019, have immersed myself in its rich cultural history, looking to reference points as varied as Giorgio de Chirico, Carlo Scarpa, Caravaggio, Artemisia Gentileschi, Cy Twombly, Jannis Kounellis, Marisa Merz, Maria Montessori, Antonio Gramsci, Alighiero Boetti, and Gio Ponti.


After graduating in 2017, Basso Pietrobon returned to her family's small 

, Italy, to immerse herself in the local culture and history that had shaped her life. There, she focused on creating art using high-quality discarded 

 from factories throughout the country. By exploring Italian histories and translating them into her art, Basso Pietrobon's practice has evolved to address global issues and missions. Her work is organized around various themes, which she collectively refers to as the Agenda.

Recently, she has performed during the Salone del Mobile in Milan and the opening weekends of the Biennale in Venice. She also collaborates with brands, as well as international architects and designers.

Reprogramming

Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism

Dr. Tsabary Shefali

Dr. Gabor Mate

Restore, Rebuild

Sculpture

Photography

Light

Mental Health

Break the Mold (english)

Cy Twombly

Giorgio Morandi

Break the Mold

Performance

Conscious Consumption

Galileo Galilei

Italo Calvino

Medici Family

A Likeness

Drawing

Participatory

Humanism

The Fair Sex

Walt Disney

Hilma af Klimt

Kazimir Malevich

Leonardo Da Vinci

Tapestry

Gender Equality

BTM - light - Cassola+Cassola

Cassola+Cassola

BTM - photo - Waiting in Cassola, Fara, and Nove

Waiting in Cassola, Fara, and Nove

BTM - set - Nove+Crespano

Nove+Crespano set 

Home

Drawing class

The Lamp Lady 05

The Lamp Lady 01

The Lamp Lady 06

The Lamp Lady 03

The Lamp Lady 02

Dimmi, Amore 

Brick Block, Tick Tock

Sow, Sew and So

Bella Burnout

Animalis

Alpha

Grey Period

Copper Nail

Roaring in Silence

Peering at the Faint Lights 

Blood Feather

White Powder, White Stone

Sardinia, Sardegna

The Fondamenta

Thank you

Bodies of Water

Terrazzo

Alpini

Unmasking

W/hole

The Conscious Cricket

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high.mp4

Stone Has Shattered

“And the weight in my stomach feels like a stone—a stone l've been trying to chisel at for years now, to remove from my body so I can finally, maybe for the first time since I was a child, take a deep full breath and feel freedom. I just want it out—I can’t keep feeling this tension and the inability to be fully open. I think the anxiety of wondering when the fish will try eating me replaces the anxiety I feel when thinking of my family. I feel like they are farther and farther away. I hear the noise of their voices, but their anger slowly fades. I hope the rock in my stomach will eventually fade into powder and float out of my body through my breath. I think the sea will help. It feels like it’s loosening something within me. Even though I feel sad, I am also feeling more myself, my own self—not connected to the past but to the present. Each of us lives our own life, and we choose how much we want others to affect it. I am learning not to be affected by others and to stay within myself, a self surrounded by the sea—alone, but not with the fear or nightmares that I had for so long. There is no fear of abandonment, of being left at sea. I feel that I am in the middle of an ocean of choices. It is here that I feel connected to the world, to life, to nature, to purity, and to the unknown.”

This project reflects upon my process of letting go of my family and releasing the weight of their expectations of me. For years, I carried their voices within me everywhere, their whispers inflecting my opinions of my career, appearance, and lifestyle. Their influence came to be an almost tangible presence in my body—a stone lodged in my stomach, lungs, or throat. It has taken a long time to chip away at the bonds of blood that tie me to them.


I have illustrated this progress towards liberation in a sculptural installation of shattered rocks, which symbolize the dissolution of the different pressures that snatched at my consciousness and kept me from hearing myself. The sculptures are accompanied by an audio recording based on an Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) therapy session, in which I describe and work through a past trauma. 

Resounding throughout the space, the volume on the recording gradually increases over several minutes, peaking at an oppressively loud level before falling again. In part, this manipulation of the audio illustrates how overwhelmed I was by my family’s power, while also referring formally to the iterative crest and trough of the sound of the ocean, where I first began to feel free. 

I have been called “Bitch” too many times in my life—often by people who owed me their respect or even their support. It took me a long time to realize that these forms of verbal abuse were not about me at all, but about the fact that I had questioned, challenged, outsmarted, or spoken back to a man. Their pride had been hurt—so they decided to hurt me. This video work documents my process of unlearning years of internalized insults, of recognizing my own power and resolving that I won’t let anyone take it away.

In an empty, white-walled room, I walk up to a blackboard with a piece of chalk in my hand. On the vacant, black surface, I write the words, “You’re a bitch.” I stand back a moment, as though considering the words I have just written. Then I erase the sentence. I write it again. Erase. I repeat this series of actions, writing then erasing the same phrase repeatedly, until there is no chalk left. I get another piece of chalk. This time, I write, “You’re wise.” I write this phrase again and again, allowing the board to fill up with the words. I write until there are only slivers of blank space in a sea of chalky marks.

I consider this piece both a video work and an event score, one which I invite others to perform publicly or privately.

Instructions

1.
Walk to the chalkboard.

2. 
Take a piece of chalk. Write a phrase that someone has wrongfully said to you—or something that you would like to stop believing about yourself.

3.
Erase the phrase

4. 
Repeat this process, writing the phrase and erasing it until the chalk runs out

5. 
Erase the board completely

6.
Pick up another piece of chalk. Write the words that you want to believe in, words that describe the person that you are or the one that you want to be

7.
Write this phrase over and over again so that the words accumulate on the board, building gradually, filling up the vacant spaces. Write until there are no unwritten spaces, until the blackboard is entirely covered in chalk.

A Nosy Nose & Cored

is about accepting individual beauty in all the forms that it takes. Through rhinoplasty and anorexia, this art project became a type of thearpy in accepting how I treated my past self and the adjustments made on my physical appearance at a young age. The psychological effects that these experiences had are explored in this body of work, to allow others who are struggling, a place to connect and converse on these important issues that many women and men struggle with.  

At fifteen, I got a nose job. I remember the day I decided to have this surgery, I stood in my room, I looked into my dresser’s three-way mirror, trying to understand if I was making the right decision. I had never thought so much about that feature of my body before. I have regretted the decision that I made many times since—though I don’t blame my younger self for being led by the doubts or ideals of others. I didn’t think, then, about the ways that our facial features link us to the other members of our family or offer a glimpse of distant ancestors. At that moment, I felt only that my nose had somehow, without my knowledge, grown to ungainly proportions—that it was my most noticeable and least attractive feature.  

For years, the market has instrumentalized the insecurities of men and women alike, preying on the desire to achieve some unattainable ideal. Barbara Kruger’s iconic body of red, black, and white silkscreens have critiqued the capitalist tactics that compel us to keep consuming products that promise a whiter smile, a flatter belly, a smaller nose. As stated in one of Kruger’s most renowned works, a print from 1989, “

.” In a performance, I carve a nose from stone, referring to a projection of a painted nose shape—my face in profile—as if rehearsing the operation that the doctor performed on me so many years ago.

 is about accepting individual beauty in all the forms that it takes. Ceramic noses rest atop discarded pieces of cashmere, canvas, linen, and wood panels. In the painted image, the contours of my face are outlined by a background of “Venetian Red,” a color that has been used for thousands of years and which was originally made from an iron oxide clay quarried near Venice. Here it appears somehow bloody, like the ties of family or like the fluid that seeped from my body during that surgery in 2001.

A nosy nose knows
A nose blows and flows
A garden hose and a rose
Like a rose a nose shows how it grows
A nosing nose

A nose knows its morning brose
And cups of Joe’s, Cheerios, and afternoon gose
The Canadian snows that froze
As I doze under the throws
With a toe that shows
I arose with the lowes

…. (pause)

To a new nose day,
Today a nose knows no noes
Close to it’s beaus
The crows are it’s only foes
A nose can pose for The Row’s photos
Choose its clothes and bows

The nose throes when one owes to those who sows
But not for bros
Ladies only for the woes
This nose slows,
Another grows
I’ll never be a Ms. Monroe,
Perhaps a painting from Miro

… (pause)

Exposed am I now,
Disclosed are the bios that tie me to those
To those who have opposed,
Pretending to bestow.
Elbows on the table,
Listening to verbose,
Hopes for a transpose,
But always deposed.

Enclosed for years,
But now I am composed when in repose

A nosy nose knows

For a time, my new nose did make me feel more beautiful. I tried modeling. I still remember the way the woman at the agency looked me over and said, “Yes, I think that’s better.” They took down my measurements, a series of numbers that seemed to say, without saying anything at all, that I wasn’t proportional, beautiful, or right. I began to work at those numbers, massage them. I tried breast enhancement pills, running, and eating less. That last came to be a problem in time. My mother would give me lunch money, which I squirreled away. No lunch, just an apple. I became a connoisseur of sorts—Pink Lady, Gala, Granny Smith, Jonagold.

draws on this struggle with anorexia. Starving my own body, I was exhausted all the time, almost without the energy to speak. When I allowed myself to eat an apple, I would turn it into a game of sorts, eating as much as I could around the core, while still making sure the fruit could still stand on its own. In retrospect, I think this act was an unwitting metaphor for my own body. I dared myself to get as thin as possible, without allowing my body to break in two.

Humming

For all the power of language, I am also interested in that which strays from its overdetermined modes of expression. Between the ages of eight and fourteen, I was 

, speaking only to those with whom I felt comfortable and in a low whisper to others. 

In large part, this was a manifestation of the invisibility that I felt after the birth of my brother, my parents’ first male child. I had always been a tomboy, not interested in playing house or dolls with my sisters. In my early years, I felt closest to my father—and was even called “Little Robbie” by the rest of the family because I resembled him so pronouncedly. When my brother was born, I lost that closeness with him and was redefined as one of “the girls,” a category that I never felt I fully belonged to. I began to talk less and less. No one could really hear me—and I felt that they weren’t listening to begin with.

During those years, I frequently hummed to keep myself company, making up wordless tunes, filling the silence that seemed to surround me with these open-mouth melodies and rhythms. Since then, I have frequently thought of this gesture and what it suggests about the fundamental sociality of speaking and hearing, even when the person you are addressing is yourself. Though I rarely spoke to others, this musical vocalization kept me from feeling alone. Sometimes I still catch myself inventing ditties when I am by myself, working songs that amplify the energy of a task.

I am interested in how a sound work made from this memory—in which I record this almost unconscious form of music—can actualize a social space for myself and for the listener, even though we are never in direct contact. I also see this work as entering a dialogue with Adrian Piper’s 

, which thematizes the creative act carried out within policed and limited confines. Likewise, my work is in part a response to the gendered hierarchies that, in literal ways, stifled my voice and expression as a child.

 is a collection which contains four projects; 

. It analyzes my experience with issues surrounding body image, in search for psychological well being and therapy. 

Within the world of ceramics, plaster molds are used to make duplicative objects; the molds are vessels which facilitate mass-production and mass-consumption. My artistic practice turns a critical eye toward this type of rote production, and asks how we can instead turn the molds normally used to make repetitive identical pieces into vehicles for unique, one-of-a-kind pieces. 

Concept

Break the Mold is a series of ceramics, photographs and performance which deconstruct and reimagine traditions of craft to produce objects that are novel and beautiful in their imperfection. I hope this work will inspire people to embrace and celebrate their idiosyncrasies, rather than conform their lives to predetermined forms.

To align the project with its mission of supporting the town of Nove, the concept was to name each form after a nearby town close to the ceramic atelier.

Family History

My work in ceramics springs from a deep familial and cultural history. In the 1950s, my grandparents left Italy for Canada, where 

. Growing up, I spent weekends in my grandfather’s and father’s lighting factory, roller-skating down the long hallways lined with fixtures and shades, and playing hide and seek amongst the boxes with my siblings. As a teenager, I spent summers helping out in the factory, and, after college, I moved to New York to work with architects and designers in the lighting industry. 

My grandfather Onorino Basso was a ceramist, born in Nove di Bassano in 1927.

Lights

The slip-casting process used for this group of works is common in commercial 

. For my series, I disrupted the process by removing the forms prematurely from the plaster molds, before their clay walls were fully hardened, and manually shaped their fragile forms into something unexpected. 

And traditionally yields materials that are sanded and glazed to perfection, every piece precisely mirroring the others.

The clay forms of the lamps are collaged from multiple different plaster molds modified to make each piece distinct; stacked in precarious configurations, they seem almost to buckle under pressure. For the standard editions, the lampshades are created with canvas, the same canvas I use for my paintings. 

Limited Edition

For the limited edition series, each one of my unique lampshades is crafted from fabrics made in the Veneto region and manufactured between 1950 and 1990, a time span that encapsulates the year of my grandparents’ immigration, my parents’ birth, and the year that I was born. By adorning the lampshades with fabrics originally used for objects, fashion, and interior design—such as silk, velvet, and wallcoverings—I suggest different relationships between the viewer and the figure of the lamp. This work also takes up the craft of my grandmother Bertilla, who made shades for my grandfather’s lamps in Canada.

Photographs

The collection also includes a series of photographs depicting my clay constructions. The photographs are a conceptual work that stand alone but are also inextricably and forever tied to the tangible, material reality of the lamps and vases they document. Printed similar to life-size, it feels as if the objects themselves are stepping out of the images and into your physical reality — a memory brought to life. If not for a pop of color from a flower, many of the images would otherwise appear to be shot in black and white due to the neutral palette of the vases and their environments. 

My white ceramic vases are willfully lopsided and asymmetrical, like the clay and glass vessels in a Giorgio Morandi painting—which warp and melt as if from heat. They wobble and wilt like the flowers they hold, seemingly pliant, tractable, and yielding, the ceramics stagger and trip over the even table surface.

Vases

The vases, when empty, recall the factories left vacant and unused in Nove. The vases, like the factories, require active investment to be brought back to life, or “activated.” By placing flowers in the vases we can completely change the energy of the space. This activation represents the artist’s desire and effort to help revitalize the factories in the town of Nove. Ideally the vases are positioned in a room in close proximity to a 

Forms

Each form that is created to make the lamps and vases are named after local towns in the vicinity of the ceramic atelier in Nove di Bassano. 

Activation

The vases, when empty, recall the factories left vacant and unused in Nove. In my images, empty vases sit in the stark lighting — the sun goes up and down, and it is as if years go by. The vases represent objects abandoned in these factories, bathed in beautiful lighting, but left waiting for the town to wake up and rediscover them. The vases, like the factories, require active investment to be brought back to life, or “activated.” By placing flowers in the vases or turning on the lamps, we can completely change the light and the energy of the space. This activation represents the artist’s desire and effort to help revitalize the factories in the town of Nove.

Diptych and Triptych

When the lamps, vases, and photographs come together in a room, they juxtapose in various combinations, creating unique installation effects. Much like in a painted diptych or triptych, the formal qualities of the pieces amplify and interact with one another to create a conceptual experience that is greater than the sum of its parts. The images mirror the vases, while the vases create physical depth and a sense of tangible possibility. A dialogue is created between the embodied 3D object and the represented 2D one.

Documentary Film

 is explained through this short documentary. Filmed by Italian photographer and videographer Giulio Favotto, this documentary explains the concepts, behind the scenes, and the mission of the project.

Performance (The Lamp Lady)

A performance will accompany the series. The performance is often over a few days. Each day I am dressed as a different deconstructed lamp: donning a unitard of different colors with various lampshades, and holding an illuminated light bulb in my hand. I envision each of my lamps as their own unique characters, and by embodying them, I bring them to life and enter into a new kind of dialogue with my work. 

As I make my way to different areas of the city, I will invite onlookers to join me in traversing the city, integrating the performance into the public sphere amongst the people who live there. 

If you found yourself in Milan the evenings of April 18-21, 2023, you just might have been lucky enough to stumble across a woman dressed as a lamp, lightbulb in hand, the physical embodiment of a flash of inspiration, making her way through the city — riding the train, eating dumplings, and sheltering from the rain — with strange and whimsical movements and an impressively deadpan expression, as if dancing to a song that exists only in her head. And had you been in the crowds that followed the living lamp’s progress, you might have noticed people smiling or taking pictures with a mix of bemusement and curiosity as they witnessed the absurd meld with the everyday: a lamp escaped from its showroom bravely wandering the streets, shining light into the night, illuminating all it passes.

The artist Jenna Basso Pietrobon presented this performance for Milan Design Week as part of her Break the Mold project, which also consists of lamps, vases, and photographs. It would have been enough for her to make these objects, but Basso Pietrobon wanted to really embody the project wholeheartedly, and to present it to the public in an open and freeform forum. Diverging from the standard presentation of work at Milan Design Week, she decided to take her art out of a building and into the city, transforming physical objects into quirky, living characters. This year’s Salone focused on lighting with Euroluce, bringing together big names in the design world. Basso Pietrobon, a relative newcomer to the scene, seemed to appear out of nowhere, bringing new luminance to the staid event.

In addition to the hand-crafted lampshade hats and different color unitards, the artist wore Bottega Veneta sunglasses each night — an homage to the fashion house based in Vicenza, close to her atelier — and Giuseppe Zanotti shoes. The four-day action was documented organically by Giulio Favotto, a talented and sought-after director and videographer based in Veneto and Milan. He created two short documentary films, one summarizing the project’s mission and another that follows the artist, affectionately dubbed “The Lamp Lady,” during her performance. The series offers the public four distinct characters over four days; Favotto captures the artist’s unique choreography in action and creates a distinct aesthetic and narrative experience for each video. The Lamp Lady doesn’t speak, seeming to only communicate through movements and minimal eye contact with the director. The bare color treatment references Roy Andersson movies,and the camera treatment takes its cues from documentary reportage. Favotto brings a rhythmical and dreamlike energy to the format, resulting in a range of dramatic and mesmerizing clips. The juxtaposition of the playful content and the serious videography also imbues the piece with a sense of humor or irony.

The performance was designed to garner attention for Break the Mold, a project which embraces and gives back her grandparents hometown of Nove di Bassano in Italy. For centuries, Nove has been a thriving center for clay harvesting and ceramics production. With globalized outsourcing of production today, it has begun to lose the material knowledge that made it a ceramics hub for generations. The artist aims to keep this history alive, while helping usher in a new renaissance for the town of Nove. Her long term goal is to create a sustainable creative hub called The Fondamenta, which will support and hopefully revive the long craft tradition of ceramics there, and create new economic opportunities for the community. A portion of the funds from Break the Mold will go toward The Fondamenta.

Proceeds

Part of the proceeds will be going to local artisans and the building of 

For centuries, Nove has been a thriving center for clay harvesting and ceramics production. With globalized outsourcing of production today, Nove di Bassano has deteriorated and begun to lose the material knowledge that made it a ceramics hub for generations. My work aims to keep this history alive, while helping usher in a new renaissance for the town of Nove. Part of the proceeds from each piece sold in the Break the Mold collection will be given to The Fondamenta, which proposes to reinvest in Nove’s legacy, stimulating job opportunities, constructing systems of support for local potters, preserving knowledge of ceramic production, and creating opportunities for the international artist community to engage with and learn from Italian artisans.

I have a great love for the town of Nove, and I hope that my work can, in a small way, help bring attention, and work, and energy to its craftspeople and industries. By working at a local scale, I believe it is possible to have an immense global impact.

Studio Visit

Videos are put together to further explain the inspiration and making behind Break the Mold. 

You can select 'sound on' icon at the bottom of the video to hear the story.

 deconstructs and reimagine traditions of craft by subverting the ethos of mass production. For this project, I engaged 

Is a series of lamps, vases, and photographs.

Produced between the 1970s and 1990s that I found in the basement of my cousin’s ceramics factory.

In the 1950s, my grandparents left Italy for Canada, where my grandfather used his knowledge of ceramics to make lamps. Following his footsteps back to Nove, Italy almost 70 years later, I have returned to my grandfather’s town to likewise produce my own clay forms. 

I like to use my art as a tool of action — it is my way of protesting about a cause or speaking on an issue I care deeply about. How can we as humans help other humans? How can I offer my own passions to the collective? What skills can I apply to help the whole? I hope that the project I propose here will represent an effort to think more expansively and generously about our fellow people, and act as a reminder — to myself and others — to fight for better living standards for families around the world.

As I write this, I am sitting in my apartment on via dei Serragli in Florence, in an area called Santo Spirito. It was here where early humanism began with Giovanni Boccacio and where Galileo Galilei practiced and declared his findings of the universe which 

“sparked the birth of modern astronomy.” 

Today, we can see the ripple effects of these findings. As an artist currently located in Florence, I’m inspired by these great minds and their work for humans across time and space. My new project, titled 

“Galileo's Observations of the Moon, Jupiter, Venus and the Sun,” NASA, February 24, 2009, https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/news/307/galileos-observations-of-the-moon-jupiter-venus-and-the-sun/#:~:text=Galileo%20sparked%20the%20birth%20of,up%20the%20Milky%20Way%20Galaxy.

 examines the idea of family. We are all born into families of varying shapes and sizes and kinds. As we age, our relationship to those families may grow or change. Perhaps our friends become family, or our pets become family. This project will act as a reminder of what family is. 

For me, the idea of family has always felt strained. There were many years that I hardly spoke to my family at all. I was the black sheep, and this came with many difficulties, but it also allowed me to grow and to do things in my own way. The absence of my family for some time has made me more attuned to the dynamics inherent in other families. 

In relation to a more contemporary Italian thinker who I recently read, Italo Calvino wrote his book Cosmiccomics in the early 1960s while he was living in America. In the book’s introduction, Martin McLaughlin explains that Calvino wrote “the vast majority of the stories in five years, between 1963 and 1968, and these were the years when the ‘space race’ between the USA and the Soviet Union was at its peak.” "The Distance of the Moon" is the collection’s first and probably best known story.

What I have recognized over the years is that a family is simply two or more beings who take care of one another. And when we stand back — perhaps 

 — we can begin to see that family also constitutes those who live together on this planet we call home. 

Living in Santo Spirito in Florence, I can’t help but think about the area’s history and compare it to today. The Santo Spirito church — whose facade is completely bare and thus very modern-looking — sits elegantly and quietly in the piazza, beyond the round stone fountain that slowly trickles water. I spend time sitting by this fountain, gazing at the church, and thinking of what occurred here. This church was the last work of Filippo Brunelleschi, who invented linear perspective and inspired the importance of drawing in Florence. It was in this church where great thinkers such as Boccaccio, Petrarch, and Cosimo Medici discussed early humanism. I believe this moment in history is especially important because the conversations of early humanism took place in a church, yet humanism became a philosophy that puts all religions aside and allows people to connect to each other on the basis of our similarities rather than our differences. Humanists tend to advocate for human rights, free speech, progressive policies, and democracy. To be a good humanist you must be engaged in the world. Part of humanism today is about giving back, helping other humans who may be in need. With

, I hope to engage in these ideas by spending time with and depicting families of all kinds and contributing a portion of the proceeds to families living in poverty.

Cosimo de Medici’s grandson Lorenzo de Medici made a great change in art by including his family as subjects of representation in his painting, rather than exclusively portraying religious figures and royalty. 

“Up until the Renaissance, art was almost exclusively informed by religious motifs. Yet, as the Italian Renaissance progressed, Western culture began to change drastically, allowing for a certain type of secular art to emerge."

Elena Martinique, “Defining Secular Art or A Different Kind of a Religious Experience,” Widewalls December 5, 2016, https://www.widewalls.ch/magazine/secular-art

Alex Greenberger, “How the Medici Family Harnessed the Political Power of Portraiture—and Brought Renaissance Art to New Heights,” ARTnews June 24, 2021, https://www.artnews.com/feature/medici-family-portraits-met-show-1234596767/https:/www.widewalls.ch/magazine/secular-art/

Not only did the Medici family affect trends in portraiture, they were also history’s greatest art patrons. 

“In 15th- and 16th-century Italy, during the height of the Renaissance, the Medici established themselves as the greatest art patrons of their day, setting a course for mega-collectors active now (think François Pinault or Mitchell and Emily Rales). Members of the Medici family forged close relationships with artists like Michelangelo and used their deep connections to commission major works that would signify their vast influence.”

This idea of patronage served as inspiration for 

; I wanted to create a project that allowed collectors to become active collaborators and supporters. By purchasing sketches of their families, participants become art patrons themselves.

 and is a participatory project in which families of all kinds can commission me to sketch personal portraits of each of their members. This project invites members of the public to become patrons of the arts, a concept inspired by the Medici family and their lasting influence on the world today.

Touching upon early humanism, the importance of ‘disegno,’ and Galileo Galilei. 

 is my way of asking myself the question: How can I utilize my own skills for something that can go beyond myself and be an offering to the collective — a way to share my passions with other humans? I hope my project will be a small, intentional way for me to center myself around this goal, and to reframe how I think about my role in the fight for better living standards in the home that all humans share.

The first goal on the United Nations 2030 Agenda is “No Poverty.” This project's aim is to help families living in poverty. 

During this time when UFOs and entities on other planets are at the forefront of conversations, I believe that we should spend less time finding life on Mars and more on fixing the Earth we currently occupy. Thinking about the endless space above our heads also makes me think of the ground our feet currently touch. What do we consider to be our reality, and with whom do we share it? Thinking about aliens reminds me that as humans we have more similarities than differences.

5% of the proceeds go to families in need who are struggling with poverty.  

I was born at 12:27am, on August 17th 1986.Wrapped in a pink blanket, I remained with my mother in the hospital for several days. On a bedside table, stood a ceramic figurine of Walt Disney’s Cinderella, my father’s first gift to me. As I grew and began to understand her dancing, musical silhouette as an icon of femininity, I couldn’t help but notice how this portrait of the heroine benefitted men rather than the woman purportedly at the story’s center. In Disney’s rendering, Cinderella was a walking doll with huge, child-like eyes and a tiny waist. She was demure, obedient, and decorative. She bought her freedom by donning the fancy dress and marrying the prince. I know my father didn’t intend this gift to be repressive - I was his princess.I tried to see past these aspects of the Disney figurine and looked for the saving graces in Cinderella’s story: her resourcefulness and hard work, her love of animals, and her ability to find magic in the mundane. Her story taught me that my imagination was endless and that I could create my own world.

But none of these lessons were encoded in that small ceramic figure. I began to understand how my body was similarly interpreted—that being a girl meant that I was supposed to play house and take care of dolls, games of make-believe meant to coach the reality of my later life. But I wasn’t interested in that type of play. 

I wanted to construct cities for my toy dinosaurs with Legos and train sets, hide out in pillow forts, or dig in the dirt for buried treasure. As I grew older, I became an aficionado of strategy games like chess or battleship. I never felt like “one of the girls.” Sometimes, I would imagine the story of my birth and childhood as though I really were some otherworldly creature, made of fundamentally different stuff.

Playing upon stereotypes of boy and girlhood, I have recreated these different playthings from my childhood as ceramic forms sapped of color. On a simple, square surface, Cinderella terrorizes a broken landscape of Legos and model train tracks. 

A photograph with the thematize color-based gender stereotypes discussing the contemporary Italian practice of celebrating the birth of a new child by decorating homes with extravagant ribbons in either pink or blue. 

Another photo of me holding a ceramic baby with the inscription of me name, year, and time of birth. The sculpture weighs the exact weight that I was when I was born.

Other photographs show the white ceramic figures, lego, and brio train set in contrast with a typical Italian tile floor from the 1930s, the time frame my grandparents were living  in the town where this work was made (before they immigrated to Canada). 

In a video work, I crush this replica of the Cinderella figurine, a final attempt to exorcize the conventions that it upholds. 

Growing up in a Toronto suburb—Woodbridge, the Italian neighborhood—I didn’t have much access to the wealth of Italian art history. Oddly enough, what defined art for me as a girl was Disney. I can’t remember when I started watching Disney films, and it was longer than usual before I stopped. The second-eldest of five siblings, my cinematic palate was limited by the comprehension of the youngest. The consequence was that I and my older sister were well into our teens before the barrage of animated characters ended.

As a child, I loved to draw, tackling linework as a puzzle to solve, looking at both positive and negative space for clues as to how to capture an image. I loved to draw Mickey Mouse, to chart his simple, interlacing geometries in thin pencil lines. I would draw the outlines and my sister would fill them in with color, a more arduous task that I didn't, at the time, have the patience for.


When I was older, I was advised to enter the field of illustration, perhaps even work for Disney—since I was ‘creative.’ Of course, at the time, I didn’t know the range of possible paths for someone in the arts. This was something I learned about later in life. I opted not to become an animator; my interest had always been in using my hands to make and play with material. I had no desire to focus my energies on a computer screen. I joined the family lighting business. And, 13 years later, I left it. Since 2021, I have celebrated returning to my childhood ability to let my imagination run loose and to simply make.


Following the model of artists such as Leonardo Da Vinci, I drew the works in this collection with silverpoint, a Renaissance technique that uses a thin piece of silver to create marks on a prepared paper surface. This contrast between the subject matter of my drawing—an image of Mickey Mouse in the 1928 film 

—and the mode of production, addresses the important role that makers such as Walt Disney (even more so than Da Vinci!) played in bringing me to the field of art.

The silverpoint sketches are shown in a row, referencing the hand drawn slides used for the making of the film. There are multiple sizes of the works, with subtle differences that when seen one right after each other, creates a motion picture. 

When I turned thirty-five in 2021, I froze my eggs. They wait for me in an Italian lab like a cold assurance of a life to come—a child, financial security, a permanent home, a partner to share my days and nights. For now, though, my womb is an empty universe, spread out like a celestial dome in ultrasound images silky with lines of information that echo the same resounding absence.

I suspend the passage of time, freeze it in the medium of photography. Twelve images that shift progressively like the changing faces of a chaste moon. Still, details escape. The camera seeks stability, but my hand shakes, Artemisia moves, my face turns. The photographs clutch at the traces of what is beyond capture or conservation.

 expresses my belief that art can be a conduit for pure feeling and spiritual symbolism, while also engaging in a Modernist revision of contemporary life. Contemporary art is often wary of spirituality, preferring subject matter that is philosophical or political. However, an important reference point for my practice is the spiritualist work of one of the few female pioneers of abstract art Hilma af Klint (1862-1944), whose non-representational compositions preceded that of other early abstractionists—including Wassily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, and Piet Mondrian—by almost a decade. 


—af Klint was a passionate spiritualist and medium from 1879 to the end of her life. In 1896, af Klint and four other women formed a group called The Five, which was dedicated to the study of mediumship, and in 1906, af Klint was tasked by higher powers with the production of a body of abstract works that she called 

. Though af Klint concealed her revolutionary visual practice from the world, she was surrounded by a cosmopolitan community of poets, scientists, and journalists whose ideas and information entered and influenced her work. 

Through discoveries encountered through this social circle and through her own spiritualist explorations, af Klint’s artistic work from 1906 to 1944 illustrated the realm of the invisible and conceptually linked world religions to scientific investigations of atoms, radio waves, and x-rays. 

an organization largely founded and run by women

(Hilma af Klint: Notes and Methods, edited by Christine Burgin (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2018), 7-12.)

 also draws on Kazimir Malevich’s Suprematist movement, which 

suggested a new vision of art—and, consequently, the world—through “pure feeling.” 

If af Klint’s work was interested in giving visual form to incorporeal forces and presences, Malevich’s Suprematism aimed to express and elicit emotional responses untethered to ideas or “objective” realities. Fundamental to Malevich’s manifesto was the decoupling of art and its historical service to spiritual and secular institutions, celebrating instead the experience of the individual: “The art of the past which stood, at least ostensibly, in the service of religion and the state, will take on new life in the pure (unapplied) art of Suprematism, which will build up a new world—the world of feeling....” The movement that Malevich started in 1915 and the treatise that he published in 1927 fundamentally shaped art for the last 100 years.
