On view in the main gallery of the Alliance for the Arts is the latest large-scale exhibition by textile designer, filmmaker and visual artist Mariapia Malerba.
Titled Moving Roots, this gallery wrap takes viewers on a journey inward, immersing them in the artist’s spiritual quest for purpose, which she expresses in the opening verse of a poem that greets visitors as they enter the gallery:
A journey unfolds, where the self is the game.
Traveling not in physical bounds or worldly strife.
But inward, exploring the deepest parts of life.
On the gallery’s main wall is a painting of a woman gazing at a skull’s visage. She contemplates not her own mortality, but the loss of creativity and the prospect of her death as an artist.
“There was a moment after going through boredom that I was afraid I couldn’t paint anymore," said Mariapia.
“Because you lose yourself to the point where you don’t even know if you’re an artist anymore, which is one of the most scariest thing that every person can experience, but in particular, people that deal with a certain type of creativity on a daily basis," she said.
"You know, when you can’t think of anything creative, you’re done, as a human, in that particular timeframe which was, like I said, very scary."
Since 2020, Mariapia has been utilizing monochrome palette and a form of calligraphy known as "Shodo," to express the themes she explores in her artworks. In "Moving Roots," Mariapia’s blacks, whites and grays signify the colorless world in which she suddenly found herself after losing her ability to conceptualize and create.
“The black and white and the gray to me was very essential to get to the core to what was that experience, and I thought color, that was too much,” Mariapia amplified.
“Being in black and white was very essential. It was perfect.”
As she began to rediscover her creative elan and rekindle her passion not only for art, but for life, signs began to appear. Mariapia has melded them into her compositions in vivid hues of crimson, scarlet, ruby and rose.
“Every symbol was something that I was searching while I was living that experience," she said.
"I was searching and I was connecting to everything that was kind of meaningful that could make me more grounded. And so I was looking for symbolism, for signs, for signs, you know. So, today I saw a red cardinal. What that means to me? Why is it showing up right now? I’m that type of person that kind of believes in synchronicity a lot.”
In addition to its arresting theme and imagery, what makes "Moving Roots" so immersive is the scale of the paintings themselves.
The panel that features the woman gazing at the skull is nine feet high and measures 36 feet in length. Another equally long 9-foot high panel consumes the opposing wall. Stepping into the gallery is like entering the womb, or a construct of the artist’s mind.
To create these sprawling gallery wrap artworks, Mariapia breaks each composition into 9 by 12 foot segments. That’s the size of the sheets of recycled paper that she uses as her supports. She installs each sheet on a 16-foot wall in her studio, and then goes to work using ladders and stepstools.
“It’s a lot of gym involved," said Mariapia. "Because I have to go up and down from the ladder, you know. I have to do maybe a couple of extra steps considering that any person will have to use a ladder here. I just go up and down and I take that as a good exercise for me.”
Viewing a panel that has three or more 9 x 12-foot segments can be challenging.
“I have a studio that’s big enough for this type of work, so I lay it on the floor and then I have to go on the ladder again to see the perspective a bit, or I can lay it in my driveway and see it from the second floor, which I do sometimes," she said. "It gives me a little more perspective, more distance to see the entire piece.”
There’s something magical that happens when the panels are installed under proper lighting on walls that surround and ensconce the viewer.
Few, if any artists, bring mural-sized paintings into a gallery, and no one employs the Shodo-inspired technique or imagery that Mariapia has incorporated into "Moving Roots."
"Moving Roots" is on display at the Alliance for the Arts now through October 28, 2023.
MORE INFORMATION:
- Shodo is a form of calligraphy in which an ink-dipped brush is used to create Chinese kanji and Japanese kana characters. Practitioners are admired for the accuracy of the characters they create, the balance with which they arrange them on the paper, how they shade the ink and, especially, the way they handle the brush while performing the calligraphy.
- The art of Shodo originated in China during the Han dynasty and came to Japan in the sixth century, along with methods for making brushes, ink and paper. In those days, calligraphy was an essential part of the education of members of noble families. But as time passed, the art spread among the common people. Today Shodo is not just a celebrated and revered art form, but a harmonious and philosophical process that fuses poetry, literature, and painting by possessing rhythm, emotion, aesthetic and spirituality in one unique art form. It’s such an important aspect of Japanese culture and ideals that it is even introduced to Japanese children as early as elementary school.
- Mariapia first introduced Southwest Florida to her unique style of art with an exhibition appropriately titled Shodopia, which she exhibited in the Capital Gallery of the Sidney & Berne Davis Art Center in February of 2020. For more on that exhibit, read “With ‘Shodopia, Mariap Malerba draws attention to endangered species.”
- Mariapia divulges that the COVID pandemic sparked the inward journey that gave rise to Moving Roots. “I had a lot of time to reflect and, at that time, I had a pretty intense experience with myself, with the deepest part of myself, trying to discover things that were kind of under the rug, dusty, never to care because I was too busy - a mother and all kinds of other stuff, a woman, and [persona that] other people know. So it was just a time I was able to kind of stop, and it was quite dramatic, I have to say, but beautiful at the same time - dramatic but beautiful, because it’s never easy to meet yourself, your real self. It’s never easy to meet the deepest part of yourself, the one you want to neglect. You might like it. You might not like it. But more than anything, it’s part of you.”
- Moving Roots will resonate with people who have gone through a period of intensive soul-searching. But even those who have not are likely to respond viscerally to the imagery that Mariapia employs. “For me, as an artist, what is important is that a person have some sort of reaction – positive, negative, emotional. I had one person burst into tears upon entering the gallery. Another actually had a panic attack. Maybe there was too much energy that was trapped somewhere. But I also have people really, really liking it with joy, so it depends on where the person is, actually.”
- Mariapia finds working on large swaths of recycled paper to be a freeing experience. It is much easier to transport 36, 136 or 236 lineal feet of paper than an equivalent amount of stretched canvas. Storage is much easier too. The Shodopia exhibit spanned some 270 lineal feet but could be folded and stored in a medium-sized piece of luggage.
- One might think that creating an artwork on a 9 by 12 piece of paper would take an inordinate amount of time. But for Mariapia, coming up with the concept is where the real work takes place. Once she completes her sketch or “study,” she then projects it onto the paper using modern-day technology, adding details by freehand once the outline is in place. The artist places a premium on precision, as it is impossible to erase on the type of paper she uses. “It’s impossible, so one line, one touch, and that’s what it is.”
- A work like Moving Roots is gallery specific. To tailor the completed panels to the gallery in which they’ll be displayed, Mariapia takes meticulous measurements of the gallery’s walls and, further, studies the gallery’s lay-out. “But if some other gallery wanted to exhibit it, it could be modified to fit their space. But hopefully they’d have at least one 36-foot-long wall."
- “At the end of the day, this is really inspirational,” touts the artist. “This work inspires me, other people, other artists, but also interior designers, for instance, who want to see how an artist can work on a big scale and concept something that could be done on purpose as well.”
- To lighten the mood and message of the main work, Mariapia created nicknames and stories for each of the symbols that appear in Moving Roots. For example, the skull became "Skully" and the exhibit contains text that tells the story of what that represents.
- “Even during experiences that are intense in life, we have to kind of not forget about the child aspect that we carry with us, right?” Mariapia asks. “Like the playfulness. Not take it necessarily too seriously because there is a lot of seriousness around and we need to be more playful, I think, because that will help everybody. Helps me. So I’m just projecting what helps me and laughing a little bit more and be happy with who we are regardless of the journey we have to do to better ourselves. I think that in this process of learning it would be very beautiful to just laugh a little bit more.”
- In that way, the exhibition ends on an uplifting note of encouragement.
- While few other studio artists work in the scale or format in which Mariapia engages, Southwest Florida can boast of at least one other artist who’s renowned for long, sinewy installation. Moving Roots is reminiscent of Bob Rauschenberg’s 1/4 Mile or 2 Furlong Piece (1981-98).
To read more stories about the arts in Southwest Florida visit Tom Hall's website: SWFL Art in the News.
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