Solo Exhibition at signs and symbols, New York
Tony Orrico: THIS ONE HERE NOW
February 16 – March 25, 2023
Orrico’s third solo exhibition with the gallery. Since 2011, Orrico has been generating Textiles, an ongoing series of hand-written tessellations derived through a somatic ritual that amasses memories from his attentive body. THIS ONE HERE NOW marks Orrico’s first exhibition solely composed of these drawings, all graphite on archival paper, engendering new meaning through deliberate thought-interventions that abruptly shift the regenerative patterns and stage tension between building forms.
Antithetical to a meditative mind, Orrico uses physical sensation as catalyst to indulgent thinking, spiraling into affiliate histories and traversing the sensorial details of each scene or setting, confounding real feeling, then and now. Though, his curiosity settles in the present, as a witness to and an account of the synaptic movement of remembering and how the mind cobbles new reality within the absences. He writes, “We push to remember. We push to forget. We retrofit meaning in the imprints and skew our own reproduction. We future.”
The performative score begins with Orrico laying beneath the first run of paper and conjuring up seven memories over the course of several hours. Amid the perpetuating points of departure, collected memories are often dropped and unrecovered. Impartial to any sense of significance, a prominent seven remain and are reduced down to words or phrases. They are written on the paper in list-form, then reflected radially — written forward, backwards, upside-down and backwards upside-down.
Across these nine works, subsequent drawing is a gradient nexus of both mishaps and wanderings of the artist’s contemplative mind. Like graphical cross-sections of a connectome, mental concepts propagate across the paper; they arrive, deviate, mutate and sometimes calcify.
8 Works:
Textile: CONVERSATIONAL BEND, 2023
Textile: OSCILLATING BETWEEN METAPHORS, 2023
Textile: LIP SKIN PEEL, 2023
Textile: I LOVE YOU THE WAY YOU ARE CHANGING, 2023
Textile: FIT INTO THE IMPRINT, 2023
Textile: SCAM ARTIST, 2023
Textile: OMNIPRESENT FRAMER, 2023
Textile: LOOKING FOR THE EXIT, 2023
Graphite on paper
111.76 x 76.2 cm (44 x 30 inches
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Collaborative Performance at signs and symbols, New York
those there in
Thursday, March 23, 7:00pm, 2023
Sound score by Tony Orrico
Performance by Cecily Campbell
24 minutes
those there in was conceived as an exchange of ideas between Tony Orrico's THIS ONE HERE NOW and Cecily Campbell's moving body of memory. Campbell's dance follows a score, grounded by seven fixed locations in the space, each of which serves as the beginning point for a three minute improvisation. Orrico's original sound score engages the same form and parameters through the act of drawing. His series of recordings become the textural backdrop of Campbell's live investigation, coexisting together in time and place, all the while derivatives of elsewhere.
Landing at a location, Campbell arrives in stillness and searches (without preciousness) for a memory — following sensations that move through her body, and allowing thoughts and imagery to meander through time until she lands on an "island." This island then becomes the physical shape (though in truth, an entirely fluid structure) of the memory itself. Sometimes the island arrives because a memory solidifies, and sometimes the island arrives because a movement arrives that doesn't have anywhere else to go, in which case she stays and looks for a memory there. Once on the island, so to speak, she rests with it for a moment to give the memory room, and then continues on into the improvisation. While she moves, she references the remarkable radial reflection so active in Orrico's drawings, which surround her in the gallery space. Allowing the memory/movement to travel through her body and through her body's sense of time, she invites and re-invites the ideas of intersections, weavings and reflective cross-references within the movement. The memory/movement translates out in new directions/orientations/body parts over the course of three minutes, and then stops (without protest) at the sound of one bell. This process repeats at each location, and the score is complete when she makes one brief and final pass through each one — exposing what is deemed memorable and all that is forgotten.
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Collaborative Performance
Tony Orrico + SKY CREATURE
A 4-hour immersive multimedia collaboration with Brooklyn-based rock band formatted for museum audiences. Sky Creature, baritone guitarist Matt Walsh and vocalist Majel Connery, crosses contemporary Classical music with ambient rock. In this high-energy collaboration, music fuels the athleticism of Orrico’s embodied practice, creating a dialogue between sight and sound that intensifies over time.
Performance Tour:
Stanley Museum of Art, Iowa City, IA: September 19, 2024
Exploratorium, Kanbar Forum, San Francisco, CA: August 31, 2023
BAMPFA, Berkeley, CA: August 30, 2023
Speed Art Museum, Louisville, KY: January 20, 2023
Knoxville Museum of Art, Knoxville, TN: January 22, 2023
Hyde Park Salon, Chicago, IL: October 28, 2022
Promo video
Performance at Center for Afrofuturist Studies, PS1 Close House, Iowa City, IA
Four Hand Draw, 2017 / 2022
Created in Collaboration with Sarahann Kolder
Approx. 35 minutes
Presented on October 7, 2022 during the Iowa Dance Festival; a durational drawing about power sharing and politics of touch. The movements are not improvised; they are choreographed and the result of 9 months of weekly meetings and an archive of conversations about power, position, intent, impact and interelational aesthetics.
Collaborative Performance at Midnight Tea, Fine Arts Building Studio #825, Chicago, IL.
Image of Thought
August 20, 2022, 7:30-9:30p
Scored by Luc Mosley and Erin Peisert
Participating Artists: David Hurlin, Katinka Kleijn, Tony Orrico, Alex Wing, Luc Mosley, Erin Peisert
