Angel­i­ca Mesiti

Angel­i­ca Mesi­ti has long been fas­ci­nat­ed by per­for­mance: as a mode of sto­ry­telling and a means to express social ideas in phys­i­cal form. In recent years she has been mak­ing refined videos that reveal how cul­ture is man­i­fest­ed through non-lin­guis­tic forms of com­mu­ni­ca­tion, and espe­cial­ly through vocab­u­lar­ies of sound and ges­ture. While bor­row­ing arche­types and styl­is­tic cues from cin­e­ma, and using the visu­al lan­guage of film to present detailed stud­ies of human sub­jects in height­ened states of rever­ie or reflec­tion, Mesiti’s works eschew lin­ear­i­ty. Instead, she uses a rich, aes­thet­ic treat­ment to uncov­er the trans­for­ma­tive poten­tial of all human beings, valu­ing the qual­i­ties of ambi­gu­i­ty and inde­ter­mi­na­cy in their own right.

This exhi­bi­tion fea­tures five recent works, offer­ing an expan­sive view of the range of sub­jects with which Mesi­ti has engaged. When con­sid­ered togeth­er, this suite reveals how the artist bears wit­ness to enchant­ed moments of inner life with her cam­era. Inten­si­ty builds through an accu­mu­la­tion of rhythms, sounds and ges­tures, flow­ing back and forth between indi­vid­ual and social space – from per­son to per­son, sit­u­a­tion to sit­u­a­tion, cul­ture to culture.

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