Anastaci Pacella

Working artist mothers have always needed to negotiate space and time to create their work with the needs of their families, this idea is not new, and while I do not think it is unique to parents - don’t all people need to balance the needs of their work with the needs of others in their lives?- it is certainly taking on a new urgency as my family navigates remote learning together. We negotiate who gets the computers for meetings and when, who gets to use the kitchen table and who must attend meetings from their bedrooms. We navigate this tricky space of creating an illusion of privacy for each other, especially my young teenager who both wants to be a part of what everyone else is doing, yet can’t stand when people are paying too much attention to her.

All this activity and space and not space coexists with my longstanding questions surrounding my ambivalence towards motherhood. I both desire and don’t desire this role in my life. Through drawing these moments of intimacy, chaos, and mundanity, I am able to connect when I want to push away. Despite the gentle and sentimental approach to these works, this drawing series emerged not from an idyllic love of motherhood, but rather a resigned recognition that this is my life right now, and I’d better pay attention to what that means for me.

The impetus for this one is quite simple: I love dicks.

There are other reasons too; as I was engrossed in a figure drawing (penis drawing), I was looking at this wrinkly, floppy thing and wondered, “How did this shriveled little organ become such a strong symbol of power?” I wanted to take away its power and violence and return it to a site of pleasure. Reacting against the tendency of some feminist artists such as, Judith Berenstein, to use the penis as a symbol for violence, these paintings are more in line with the “Male Landscapes” of Edith Golden. They explore the penis as a site for sensuality through the female gaze.

This piece that was installed July 26-August 2, 2018 at the Vermont College of Fine Arts functions both as documentation of the labor of undoing a garden taken over by invasive plants as well as an ode to that which never came to be.

The performative act of cutting down vines and digging out old roots that had grown unchecked for over ten years was a physical act that took on a metaphor for unlearning toxic thoughts. From this labor I wanted to create something that looked beautiful yet was hostile or oppressive the way many of our formative relationships within a dominating culture often are. What resulted was a space of arrested development – it is a collection of precious things belonging to someone who is neither adult nor child. The collection is held within a tent – or cage – made of thorns and ivy which protect the collection from outsiders, but also threaten to strangle it, keeping it captive.