Artist Victoria DeBlassie | Spagyric viscosities.

VISCOSITA’ SPARIGICHE (SPAGYRIC VISCOSITIES)

DeBlassie, for years, has been exploring the permutable and astatic nature of material intended for mass consumption and assumed to have a lateral, linear and static lifespan, that is, born to be used then consumed then wasted. What interests Victoria in these materials is the opposite, the fact that they exist within a spectrum of transmogrifications and transmutations, from one stage to another.
DeBlasslie, instead, identifies and highlights the protean nature of the material, in this case the orange peel, the fluid nature of the orange peel in its various stages of being. Emphasizing within each physical phase a historical, philosophical, and environmental period that exists within to complicate the narrative, all of which DeBlassie will showcase here at Finestreria.
Broken down into states of matter, all three major forms will be on display, from gas to solid to liquid, all represented by a varied way of dealing and working with citrus peel. The orange peel in its gaseous state, that is, fragrant and aromatic, something to be seen and felt in the air, olfactorily; and then there will be the solid form of the orange peel, the skin reprocessed, layered and laminated to be made permanent and perpetually fresh, a building material, a “plypeel.” and finally, there will be the liquid form, the cascading flow of orange peels designed to represent an enormously flowing waterfall full of effluent life, citing the waterfalls of Renaissance gardens, at a time when this fruit was rare and thus had great importance only to diminish in value over time later because of its ubiquity.
In the midst of all this there will be orange peel like dust, somewhere between a solid and a gas, which will occupy an interstitial space, a purely ephemeral entity, a little bit like the role of oranges in general in this world, a heterochromatic fruit, that somehow unites all its states.
Connor Maley