signs and symbols

Tony Orrico: Great Divide

February 24 – March 27, 2021

Opening Day:
February 24, 2021
2:00 - 6:00pm

signs and symbols is pleased to present Great Divide, Tony Orrico’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. 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.

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, perineum and genitals, 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.

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).

Unentitled (some legwork). In direct response to the former President’s public address post his incitement of an insurrection at our nation’s Capitol, Orrico performed two consecutive actions in his studio the following day. His inverted white/male/artist embodiment bares messaging and postures that share in the ego and culpability of white supremacy. Using humor as a device, the personification of his genitals aims to lock the gaze in his subjection and mediation. Two entities quiver inside their held stamina, while morphing gestures suggest flexing, stretching, sun-bathing, and motioning to “who, us, what?” as if, why do we not see ourselves(?).

tony orrico's work has reached mass circulation for its ingenuity within the intersections of performance and drawing. His work explores how consciousness and physical impulses manifest into visible forms. He uses his own somatic research, Suspension Practice, as point of entry into his visual work. Orrico has performed/exhibited his work across the US and internationally in Australia, Belgium, China, Denmark, France, Germany, Mexico, the Netherlands, Poland and Spain. His visual work is in the permanent collections of The National Academy of Sciences (Washington DC) and Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC, Mexico City) as well as prominent private collections such as Grazyna Kulczyk, Kablanc/Fundación Otazu and Bergmeier/Kunstsaele, among others. He has presented at the CCCB, Centre Pompidou-Metz, The New Museum and Poptech 2011: The World Rebalancing. Orrico was one of a select group of artists to re-perform the work of Marina Abramovic during her retrospective at MoMA (2010). As a former member of Trisha Brown Dance Company and Shen Wei Dance Arts, Orrico has graced such stages as the Sydney Opera House, Teatro La Fenice, New York State Theater and Theatre du Palais-Royal. In 2020, Orrico was included in the book PERFORMANCE DRAWING: New Practices since 1945, a collection of interviews and essays exploring the relationship between drawing and performance, published by Bloomsbury.