EFF
Amanda Curreri

June 24 - July 30, 2016

Romer Young Gallery is pleased to present its fourth solo exhibition with artist Amanda Curreri. There will be an opening reception for the artist on Friday, June 24, 6-9pm.

Eff - shorthand for effigy and also short-shorthand for the colloquial "f," as in fuck – leads these new works in a summoning of states of passion, self-possession, and responsive activity.

While some works in the Eff series are direct tributes to actual individuals (track star Flo Jo, poet/activist Adrienne Rich, activist/librarian Barbara Gittings), the works in this exhibition focus less on individuals and more on states of being. Colorfully loud and wall-based, the works employ textile processes such as dyeing, printing, masking, patterning, negative and positive image construction, garment construction and re-construction. Traditions of Icon painting serve as an underpinning for these works to be (about) ways of being in the world.

Formal relationships in the works test out metaphors of margins and centers. Time-shifts are evoked in works that are "branded" - much like a tattoo on skin - with logos and dates that span a past and future timeline. In some works an ancient Neapolitan symbol for protection is employed in the service of this time-travel (much in the way a medium asks for protection when dealing with the spirit world). This looking backwards is not motivated by nostalgia but rather by a need for models, comrades, and a wider understanding for dealing with our current troubling times. Curreri's is a dialogic practice creating conversation between and beyond the works, viewers, and within actual and constructed feminist, radical, and queer historiographies.

AMANDA CURRERI is an interdisciplinary artist and educator living and working between Cincinnati, OH and the Bay Area, CA. Curreri recently joined the faculty of University of Cincinnati’s School of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning (DAAP) in Cincinnati, OH. Curreri had her first solo museum exhibition this year at Rochester Art Center, Rochester, MN and has been exhibited at the Asian Art Museum, SF, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, SF, and Ortega y Gasset, NY. Curreri was in the 2011 Incheon Women's Biennale in Korea, a recipient of a Joan Mitchell Foundation Fellowship in 2009 and a SF Guardian Goldie Award in 2010. Curreri has recently received a grant to launch a new independent art press, Special Collections, partnered with the art library at the University of Cincinnati and produced lovingly via Risograph. Curreri holds an MFA from the California College of the Arts, a BFA from The School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and a BA from Tufts University in Sociology and Peace & Justice Studies. Curreri is represented by Romer Young Gallery in San Francisco, CA.