Solo exhibition by Luca Soldovieri curated by Taiga Lipson
April 11 - 17th, 2019
Weight of Being
As children, we tackle the same handful of metaphysical challenges – we suffer in class through minutes that last days, and are perplexed at recess by hours that pass in seconds; we look up at night and try to comprehend the size of our galaxy as we fail over and over to stretch our minds outward to encompass the stars; we learn for the first time about endings, and death. As children we learn about the intangible, the immeasurable, the ineffable; we study it like small scientists and seem to understand better than grown ups how a thing can be more than the sum of its parts.
Luca Soldovieri works with the immeasurable, moving beyond art into alchemy. Alchemists sought to turn lead into gold on their way to create the elixir of life, and in so doing conquer time, conquer death, and achieve immortality. Soldovieri labours, as the alchemists did, to transform base metals into something new and profound. Weight of Being displays a different kind of philosopher’s stone, engaging with the curious science of childhood and the growing pains of age and memory. Soldovieri’s sculptures master time through transformation, capturing the weight of memory, love, nostalgia, and heartbreak.
Lead Weights
The material itself contains the history of four generations. As a child, Soldovieri’s grandfather gathered the leftover bullets and boot soles from his parents and relatives who had been in the war, and as a grown man he remade them into toy soldiers for his son, her father. She was taught by her grandfather how to melt and manage lead over a camp stove in the family yard, so Soldovieri has taken these generations-old bullets and toys and reappropriated them for her own purposes. Using precious objects from her own life, Soldovieri weighs each one and then creates the equal weight of that object in a cube of lead. Reduced to their physical weight alone, the objects are removed from their original meaning and purposes, retaining their title as the only means of connecting the two. The material is both of history, and contains history. It is both a family portrait and the abstraction of memory.
It is surprising how small the cubes are compared to the object they embody. The expectation is that they would be so much bigger, so to make up for their diminutive size they must therefore be impossibly heavy. You desperately want to pick them up, if only to justify the size and weight in your mind. Seeing the sculptures removed from their original context throws into relief how much is absent, how much of a thing resides beyond its physical limits in the immeasurable weight of emotional significance.
Approaching this exhibition felt, to me, like wandering into the hush of a Natural History Museum, observing room upon room, row upon row of specimens at once beautiful and alien. They seem to possess a certain power, their long Latin names sound like spells. The first time I was introduced to Soldovieri’s work I walked up to the unassuming cubes expecting that same anonymous mystery of the unfamiliar, and instead I was confronted by recognition in their names: ‘Velveteen Rabbit’ and it’s fellow ‘stuffed animal, Elephant’. These aren’t fossils from a distant eon, I recognize them from my own childhood, the haze of nostalgia compacted and made tangible.
What is the weight of a marriage? The visual mass of two abstracted wedding rings can’t begin to encapsulate the phenomenal burden those rings have borne. In symbolism alone, a marriage bears up under its load: days and holidays, fights and finances, sickness, health, secrets kept, wars waged, and love. A marriage is enormous. By comparison, the pair of cubes can only make up for their diminutive size by being elephant-heavy, skyscraper heavy, black-hole heavy. Turned towards each other, they seem to take on a personality of their own, a husband and wife pair, speaking quietly to one another.
The Scale of Infinity: Family Videos and Video Objects
Soldovieri extracts the greater detail from her home videos in order to focus on the light source, which shifts around the screen in dialogue with the young girl on the trapeze, a perfect metaphor for the artist herself in her youth. The light is an eternal, perpetual thing, and yet it is shaped by her shapes; it changes and casts shadows with her movements. We watch the screen as she would have watched it in childhood. Both the light and the girl on the trapeze still exist today, but neither will ever be again as they were in that film. The light, like the girl, has grown and moved on.
By printing film stills of each fraction of a second and arranging them in a stack, Soldovieri has made a sculpture of Time. Suddenly, seconds have become centimeters. Minutes can be measured in printer ink and time measured by height, just like the growth of a child marked in pencil against a doorframe. Soldovieri plays with mathematical infinity: seconds are divided into fractions of seconds, and further into fractions of fractions. As the stack grows, time becomes exponentially heavier, and if played as a flipbook, it would appear to slow . . . infinity is in the details.
Weight of Being reads as a love letter to memory. Attempting to make an accurate system of measurement for something as subjective and permeable as time, to walk the line where nostalgia lives between sadness and love requires a new kind of alchemy. Engaging with the work clarifies a certain internal weight, an emotional resonance counterbalanced against the memories of precious objects, moments, and embraces of our own past. What impacts us the most will survive decades, immaterial and perpetual. The Velveteen Rabbit explains it better than I ever could:
“When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.”
- Taiga Lipson
Luca Soldovieri is an artist and writer born in Chicago, IL and currently practising in Toronto, ON. She has exhibited previously at Stephen Bulger Gallery, Neilson Park Creative Centre, Les Enfants Terribles, and is part of an upcoming exhibition at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, NY. Her first novel, ‘How to Build a House’ was published in 2018 by Hektor Projects and launched at 3/edition International Art Book Fair. Soldovieri currently studies Contemporary Art at Etobicoke School of the Arts.
