About the Artist:
Johnny Adimando is an artist/educator living and working in Rhode Island. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, and is in public and private collections including The Philadelphia Free Library, Bucknell University, Tower Investments Gallery, The Lyman Allan Museum, and various flat file collections. His recent awards include Professional Development Funding Grants from the Rhode Island School of Design, Ruth Katzman Fellowship to the Art Students League of New York, full fellowship to the Chulitna Lodge Wilderness residency in Alaska, Berkshire Taconic Artist Fund grant, and 2016, 2017, and 2020 Rhode Island State Council on the Arts fellowships.
Work Statement:
In my overall work, I explore the seemingly innate urge for self-preservation that threads throughout all of nature…specifically how when reduced to essentials all mental, physical, and even philosophical adaptations seek to achieve the singular goal of survival. I am also deeply interested in the phenomena of failed-protection on psychological and religious levels. Moreover, I am intrigued by the ways in which these so-called adaptations can also be to our detriment, and how acts of over-compensation, such as excessive penitence or “prepping”, can lead both directly, and even quickly to the failure of an individual and/or species.
Conceptually, the work focuses largely on the amassing of defensive mechanisms, obsessive/phobic habits, beauty as camouflage, alchemical/occult/ritual practices for the generation of shields and sigils of protection, the theoretical and actual function of panopticons, the historical evolution of armor and armaments, efforts related to securing ourselves against the world, and the ways in which these measures may lead us to various forms of atrophy.
I largely view the pieces as exoskeletal, literal chrysalis that simultaneously support internal transformations, transmutations, and even translations both amidst and against the chaos of the world writ-large. I look to these liminal spaces as oracles, ever knowledgeable of the purported past and potential future; a snapshot of arabesque machinations, dipping toes both into and out of time. Dwellers on the threshold, caught in pregnant pauses; both awoken and adrift. At once, form and shadow, snake and sheath, became and becoming.
The work is predicated on the harmonious mixture of drawing, painting, and sculptural pursuits with myriad printmaking techniques: traditional, experimental, and inventive. I use successive and perhaps obsessive layering of images, forms, and textures, to build structures analogous to skins, shells, and other safeguards. Although the work appears metallic and amply-weighted it is, in fact, constructed almost entirely of paper and is thus very light. It is prickly, scaled, and armored. Yet, intrinsically frail. It is anchored, heavy, and megalithic. Yet, intrinsically fragile. It is a veritable sheep in wolves’ clothing.
© Johnny Adimando | Artist Biography, Artworks & Gallery
