ALYSSA DANNA

How Handsomely You Dwell begins with the familiar, often pathetically hopeful, decorative objects found in thrift shops and garage sales. These objects compel me because they hold within them the paradox of a lost beauty, love, and value. This contentiously abject state is the impetus for me to create sculptures that seek to revalue the object’s preciousness through their repurposing. I celebrate their freedom from the confines of prescribed beauty and instead revel in the tacky, trite, and avant-garde realm of supposed poor taste. The sculptures, in this way, embody a dark humor that allows them to move beyond their formerly pathetic state while making ironic reference to it.

These once precious items are revived through formal design, ornamental pastiche, do-it-yourself crafts, and organic configurations that coat the artistically taboo in layers of adornment to form an irregular pearl. I create dimpled, sticky, painterly surfaces that simultaneously consume and unify the objects with which they come into contact. The ambiguity of creation and destruction mimic the use and reuse of material found in natural processes. I strive to beautify in a subversively complex way; paralleling the neon fuzz that grows on top of old yogurt with culturally accepted modes of decoration. This baroque transformation gives rise to an amalgam of sentimentally charged and often aggressive manifestations that are curiously and grotesquely real.