Collecting Ourselves

Family Resemblances

Sally Curcio

April 3 – April 28, 2005

Hampden Gallery
University of Massachusetts, Amherst

“Some people collect for investment. Some collect for pleasure. Some folks do it to learn about history. And some people "save things" because it helps them to fill a gaping hole, calm fears, erase insecurity. For them, collecting provides order in their lives and a bulwark against the chaos and terror of anuncertain world. It serves as a protectant against the destruction of everything they've ever loved.” --Judith Katz-Schwartz

"Clinging is the origin of this entire mass of suffering & stress.”--Buddha

“I can think of no better expression to characterize these similarities than ‘family resemblances’…” --Ludwig Wittgenstein

Sally Curcio’s new body of work, “Family Resemblances,” explores collections of everyday objects through assemblages. “Family Resemblances” refers to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s theory that words cannot be unequivocally defined by clear and specific characteristics, but rather through usage and a “train of associations” (or “family resemblances”) that emerges historically. His theory indicated there is no solid meaning, or essences. Wittgenstein left us with an uncomfortable uncertainty. Curcio explores our need, in the face of this uncertainty, to categorize and collect in an attempt to stabilize meaning.

This body of work, as with her past work, presents three defining features. First, as in past shows, a wide variety of media is used to express her chosen topic. Second, the work is a gestalt: each piece informs the other pieces. And finally, Curcio takes a potentially dark theme and reverses it into lightness with the pure visual pleasure of her constructions.

In “Family Resemblances,” Curcio uses an array of materials: gumballs, dominoes, false eyelashes, toy guns, lottery tickets, game pieces, bottle caps, underwear, arms from dolls, and watercolor paint squares.

Curcio shapes these objects into assemblages that evoke our fascination with categorizing and collecting objects, and our bent to be connoisseurs: each work obliges us to compare, contrast, rank, and critique a collection. Curcio’s collections comically summons this impulse into action. The works offers, in a self-consciously naïve way, the self-satisfaction of collecting a “complete” set of objects, and the need for recognition in publicly displaying this triumph. Curcio teaches us that the process of collecting, organizing, and display is a ritual that attempts to create an oasis of certainty, order, and self-identity.

Each of Curcio’s pieces deliberately confronts us with an alien obsessive attention to precision and order suggesting an unconscious urgency. This translates positively into visually satisfying art that evokes the simplicity and “cleanness” of minimalism, the freshness of op art, and the innocence of folk art. The shapes are simple and satisfying, the colors are bright, the work beautifully neat, and the materials surprisingly familiar, albeit re-contextualized. With these attractive simulated collections the artist has gathered a gallery of artifacts that speaks to our perpetual drive to somehow, in some way, take control and make sense of things.

J.M.M. Wilson III, Ph.D.