Solo Exhibition at signs and symbols, New York​

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Tony Orrico: Great Divide

February 24 – March 27, 2021

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The exhibition features a new series of performative graphite drawings, sculptures and a double-channel video. With this new body of work, Orrico investigates the boundaries of his movement practice by negotiating the enigmatic, interior spaces of bodily memory — bodies remember trauma, yet such recollections are malleable. Bodily memory is not direct but rather the result of perceptual, spatial and internal information that is stored and passed on through generations. Orrico thus tests the limits of his own physicality and its memory by exploring the male splits as a powerful access point to vulnerability.

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Vertical Stretch. Horizontal Stretch. Father’s father’s father. Through the chaos and rigidity. The act of drawing is motivated by a ‘felt-sense’ of the artist’s body as a confluence of articulating contours. Standing and contacting the paper with graphite in both hands, Orrico navigates pathways of sensation across his legs, hips, and perineum, transferring the spatial-information into line. Departing from previous work, the action in these drawings is brief and discontinuous. Spontaneous rhythms through the twisting and undulation of the hips distort the passage, delivering wild ellipses and broader strokes that nod to qualities of expression. There is a second, more extended treatment that bypasses the sense of integration in the body. With his dominant hand, Orrico curiously outlines the initial trace and amasses imperfections in paper fibers, relief from textures of the wall, evidence of haste in hanging and handling of the paper, and smudges generated by the committed labor.

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Orrico writes: “Children are messengers when we are listening to them. They are so wakeful to what their bodies need or desire, and they are absorbing so much detail and nuance. I’ve been looking at spaces in my experience that continue to meet denial, have resisted nourishment for some time, or have gone missing. The politics within what I hold, what I manifest, and how I harm are becoming more visible to me; that which is of my body, the social and historical bodies I belong to, how our limbs extend, divide, other and dominate. These works enter intentions to subvert previous work and practices, to acknowledge the push for production cemented within me, to touch what is tender and expose myself in the procession of uncertainty. In considering what is alive in me, and what is alive around me, I am asking, how do I interfere? and what is it in service of? I find inspiration from Erin Manning’s words in Politics of Touch; she writes: “…one way in which bodies resist normative politics such as those of the nation-state is through reaching across the boundaries imposed by the body-politic. This crossing does not necessarily inaugurate a difference in the political structures at hand, but it does engender an adjacent body, a supplementarity, an individuation that potentially stands in the way of pre-constituted organizations of bodies” (2007, 86).

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