2026 Georgia Women to Watch: A Book Arts Revolution National Museum of Women in the Arts at the Atlanta Contemporary
More images and information about this piece found at this link: Fata Morgana
Fata Morgana/Mondo Nuovo & Janus Series
Fata Morgana/Mondo Nuovo is inspired by the tradition of the Mondo Nuovo as depicted in Tiepolo's fresco in Ca'Rezzonico, in Venice, and the later advent of tunnel books or peep-show books. Tiepolo’s Mondo Nuovo occupies a similar place in the history of the pre-cinema as the magic lantern, also known as cosmorama, which contained painted glass plates illuminated with a candle to project images of colorful fantastical and exotic scenes in a darkened space. The scenes typically depicted in a magic lantern represent a collective longing for new and unknown places, the evidence of a diffuse tendency toward escapism. Tunnel books, popular in the 18th and 19th centuries, featured many layered scenes with the centers cut out to reveal the scenes behind when expanded like an accordion bellow, viewed through a small oculus on the front page, rendering the fantastical and telescopic effect accessible and portable, becoming popular as souvenirs.
The Mondo Nuovo of Tiepolo depicts an enclosed diorama or peep-show theater surrounded by a crowd of costumed people resembling the characters from Neapolitan Pulcinella from the commedia dell’arte which prevailed in Italian puppetry traditions dating to the 16th and 17th centuries. As they wait their turn to peer inside, we also see the Charlatan who controls the scene and in this microcosmic image we witness the public (now depicted as characters) in the act of engaging in escapism, particularly relevant in Venice in a period of heightened tensions and anxieties in advance of the fall of the Venetian Republic under Napoleon. Whereas a panorama places the viewer in the center of a wide and immersive panoptic landscape, the tunnel book/peep show permits a more intimate layered, telescopic view, while giving the viewer a false sense of being an unseen observer. Tiepolo’s painting plays further on the telescopic view, breaking the fourth wall, revealing these as voyeurs, and places us as viewers into the role of spectators, knowing we also occupy the same position as those depicted, subject to a hidden, all-seeing eye.
Fata Morgana/Mondo Nuovo (featured in exhibitions including Due South and solo exhibitions at The Print Center, Philadelphia and Spring/Break Art Show, NYC) emphasizes ambivalent scenarios recalling Tiepolo's Mondo Nuovo and the spectacle of watching while being watched. Symbols, omens, and narratives that weave through this piece find echoes in other works from this time period and are still prevalent in my more recent works of the past three years.
Fata Morgana/Mondo Nuovo is a peep show that presents an ambivalent narrative mythologizing the small Sicilian hill-top town of my family’s origin and where I still live, employing pre-cinematic themes and conventions to reveal a complex setting that is at once enchanting, idyllic and abysmal. True to any place, the more time spent looking, the more the curtain is drawn back to reveal hidden narratives. Here, true stories from a very recent past are re-enacted by figures from Greek statuary, set into real environments that take on an exotic and fantastical aspect. The porcelain facades are hand-sculpted and cast replicas I made of the oratory in my town which overlooks the main square and acts like a backdrop for the theater of everyday life in our small Sicilian town.
Loosely referencing Greek mythology, Arthurian myth surrounding Mt. Etna, the story of Orlando Furioso, and memes of Sicilian puppet theater, Fata Morgana, like a mirage or a castle in the sky, represents a place of fantasy that holds the promise of harmony, appearing and reappearing suddenly and without warning, just like the Aeolian Islands that seem to vanish and reappear in the changing light. Mondo Nuovo, or the New World, recalls Tiepolo's fascination with these microcosmic scenes and the enchanting spectacle of watching while being watched. In this case, Mondo Nuovo reveals this place as though through a darkened lens; the constant menace of the hidden all-seeing eye, subplots in the periphery, falseness, a culture of excess and depravity, paranoia, complacency, and self-destruction obscured by the beautiful chaos of the natural surroundings. Contradictory realities flip and change as quickly as a glowing slide of a magic lantern, transfixing the viewer who, like in Tiepolo’s Mondo Nuovo, subsequently becomes spectator, participant, subject, and character.
Janus Series
This series of diptych screenprints in metallic gold and cyan ink are iterations of the dual-sided proscenium scenes within Fata Morgana/Mondo Nuovo (2016 - present), an ongoing edition of four free-standing double-sided illuminated peepshow theater made from cast porcelain, hand-colored screenprints, wood, and plexiglass. The individual titles are:
Peaceful Day
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Power Play
Welcome committee of an aging town
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Does the quill vanquish with blood or with ink?
Camera Lucida
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Satyr and Decoy
I also wanted one piece of ground: / One city trapped by hills. One urban river. / An island in its element. / So I could say mine. My own. / And mean it. -Eavan Boland, "The Lost Land”
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One for sorrow, two for joy, three for a girl, four for a boy, five for silver, six for gold, seven for a secret never to be told. - Magpie Nursery Rhyme
We who remember when plants populated this pavement
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And everyone says that wool doesn't burn, as lambs go flaming through the thistle
Janus Series is a series of five screen-printed diptychs that focus on the interior scenes within Fata Morgana/Mondo Nuovo. In the sculptural peepshow, these images are hand-colored in vibrant watercolor, the mirrored silhouettes placed back-to-back and spaced in even succession to create a tunnel-book and double-sided peepshow. Janus Series reworks the double-sided interior proscenium scenes of Fata Morgana and presents them as mirrored silkscreen prints, printed in gold metallic ink with cyan blue linework.
Seen mirrored in this way, the play between the grotesque (grotto-like) ornamentation and symmetry of the negative spaces evoke the eye-sockets of ornate jewel-encrusted skulls previously popular in Italian funerary traditions. The framing devices employed in grotto design have been a mainstay of my approach to composition, positive-negative space, and layered views of the proximate and distant. Seen in a more sequential book form, Janus Series presents each pair of scenes displayed side-by-side and face-to-face as mirror images, each with their own title and narrative.
From a distance, the diptychs appear as pairs of grotesque empty eye-sockets of a precious, adorned skull. Printed simply in metallic gold with cyan blue line work, they change in shifting light and permit viewers to study the details and further read the narratives, many of which are obscured by other figures when seen within the sculptural piece Fata Morgana/Mondo Nuovo. Seen as diptych pairs in their simplified color schemes with individual titles, viewers are also provided with multivalent entry points into the meanings embedded in each scene.
Title Magazine - The State of the Print
