BIO

Anastaci Pacella is a multimedia artist exploring ideas of domesticity, sexuality, and discomfort. Pacella’s studio practice currently focuses on creating immersive installations that make private experiences both public and visible. She sources and transforms materials found in domestic environments to create uniquely formatted paintings, sculptures and environments that allow the artist to examine notions of normative family life and related emotional discomfort.

Pacella earned a BFA in Art Education from UMass Dartmouth in 2012 and her MFA in Visual Arts at the Vermont College of Fine Arts. Pacella has exhibited throughout New England in a variety of group exhibitions, and has enjoyed to support of numerous artists, including Faith Wilding, who have helped her foster connections between her own art, feminist values, and community activism. Pacella is also a Co-Founder and curator of The Cordial Eye Gallery and Artist Space in Hyannis, MA, where she uses her platform to hold space for emerging artists questioning social norms and investigating forms of institutional critique.

Artist Statement

Indebted to the confessional work of Tracy Emin, Anastaci Pacella’s work centers around the idea of making the private public. Pacella incorporates found objects, materials, and ready mades from her domestic setting into collages, paintings, and installations. One of the seminal elements of Anastaci Pacella’s work is The Little Pastel Penis series, which consists of an array of brightly colored paintings of gesturally rendered penises. Reacting against the tendency of some feminist artists, such as Judith Berenstein, to use the penis as a symbol for violence, Pacella’s art is more in line with Edith Golden’s “Male Landscapes”.

More recently, Pacella has undertaken a drawing series documenting her families experience working and learning remotely. Negotiations of privacy, time, and space to work are common themes for many women artists, especially those who are parents, and these questions have taken on new importance for Pacella while she and her children negotiate who get to attend virtual meetings from the one “good” wall in the house and who must watch the baby.