signs and symbols

Tony Orrico: THIS ONE HERE NOW  

February 16 – March 25, 2023        

Opening Reception:
February 16, 2023
6:00 - 8:00pm  

Performance with Cecily Campbell:
those there in
Thursday, March 23, 7:00pm

signs and symbols is pleased to present THIS ONE HERE NOW, Tony 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.  

tony orrico is known for his ingenuity within the intersections of performance and drawing. His works investigate mental and physical endurance, somatic drawing, choreography, bio-geometrics and improvisational practices. Orrico has performed/exhibited his work across the US and internationally in Australia, Belgium, China, Denmark, France, Germany, Mexico, Norway, 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. Orrico is currently an Assistant Professor of Sculpture & Intermedia, and Dance at the University of Iowa, in Iowa City.