Voyage of the Transfer

While investigating subtleties within movement efficiency as a dancer, my attention strongly favored the depth of awareness I was experiencing onstage. In fact, any extent of virtuosity became too strong of a distraction from what I was interested in exploring.

I began to consider consciousness as a medium. I had danced for nearly a decade, and I asked myself: What are the other applications for a ready body and mind? What might they imply? Blurring the lines between my ongoing disciplines, I began appropriating my own somatic work, my symmetry practice (circa 2005) as methodology to enter my visual work. Previously, as a mover, I used these visualization exercises to help me alert proprioceptors and balance the hemispheric tension of my body. In 2008, I stopped painting with a dominant hand and employed bilateral drawing as a means to measure dual frictions against a surface. In my termed state of readiness, I started to investigate the sustained application of a present body to a plane, object, or course.

I am fascinated with how physical impulses manifest into visible forms. My work often displays infinities of reflective and rotational symmetry with attention to what is lost/gained through representations and how imagery in motion may replicate, mutate, or disintegrate. Centralizing on themes of cyclic motion and the generation and regeneration of material, my work draws on the tension between what is fleeting and what is captured.

Without the use of technology, I have been attempting interface with the invisible. Sight is one sense that we use to negotiate and communicate shared space, and it constantly reminds us of what materials are tangible or what constructs are in place. We interpret and represent visible structures through point, line, shape, fill, etc. We can create substance from substance by tapping into universal matter and reorganizing it to make our concepts visible. I appreciate ways action turns solid and how the image or residue of something experiential may fail to translate. The exchange of images feels much more distant than we realize. It is less of a handshake and more of a note sent by carrier pigeon. The image received has the voyage of the transfer impressed upon it.

Tony Orrico, /Vessel for Governing and Conception/. Photo: Juan Carlo. Courtesy the artist and MARSO.

My Penwald Drawings are a series of bilateral drawings in which I explore the use of my body as a tool of measurement to inscribe geometries through movement and course. My gestures derive from the limitation of (or spontaneous navigation within) the sphere of my outstretched arms. Line density becomes record of the mental and physical sustain as I commit my focus to a greater concept of balance throughout extended durations of drawing. The master of each drawing is a conceptual score of which I only produce eight live-iterations or impressions, on paper.

While my Penwald Drawings avail paper, graphite, and body to discover vast terrains through limitation, CARBON further synthesizes these mediums by freeing the imagination and confounding surfaces. I am continuing to explore space that is absent of emotion, rationale, memory, reaction, projection, judgment or inhibition. I am attempting to navigate through the body’s receptors and simulate a sense of suspension to shift my relationship to the physical realm, especially gravity. This interest derives from reconciliations of the beauty and great tension I find coexisting within powers of creativity and temporality, transformative potential and the mundane.

Tony Orrico, Penwald: 8 (2012). 12' × 12' on knees. MUNAL, Mexico City. Photo: Berna J. Klein Ríos.

Tony Orrico, Penwald:12 : prone to stand (2012). University of Buffalo Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY. Photo: Bill E. Meyers.

Tony Orrico, Penwald: 4: unison symmetry standing (2013). Studio impression 1. Photo: Megan Bearder.