Madonna del Cardellino (dopo Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino)
No Longer Available
Completed
2019
Medium
Cotton, Wool, Glass Beads; Jacquard Weaving
Dimensions
82" x 42"
Description
With sincere blasphemy, I employ the fallen glory of tapestry to reorient the holy within queer cosmology. My materials–cotton, linen, wool, synthetic gold, and glass beads–are at once exquisite and contrived, further reflecting the irresolute tensions between queerness, ethnicity, and the sacred. New worlds are imagined where no resolutions can be made. I am defiantly a weaver. Through this position, I reconsider tapestry as a modality in which image, matter, technology, and embodiment provide productive conflicts for constructing form. Drag, in all its bombastic and glittering glory, is a guiding sensibility which I engage to retrace (and undo) faith, history, and legacy. Here, I employ improvisational handwork to mutate relics, icons, and ritual matter into opulent woven memorials that twist time. The resulting tapestries are unbound from chrononormativity to rest, uncomfortably, within queer temporality. Released from the tyranny of the present, my work looks toward a future-past horizon where one can exalt a queer apotheosis. The Magnificat tapestries are remediations of Italian Renaissance paintings of the Madonna. The sacred image serves as the underpainting upon which I compose a new image from the ashes of the original. I engage an oxymoronic union that merges the logic of digital weaving with improvisational making. Introducing the mixture of colorful threads live at the loom, I actively mutate the painting into an image that recalls its origin even as it becomes something new. In this way, the tapestries I weave today retrace art historical images to parody and blaspheme their piety. With Magnificat I draw upon the work of the great masters to complicate, to infiltrate, and to reclaim my cultural legacy. As the queer child of an Italian American immigrant family, the Italian Renaissance is a heritage that represents an orthodoxy from which I have been ostracized. The Italian people have been Catholic for 2,000 years; it is a bond I cannot and will not deny. Responding aesthetically, I activate divested allusions to Catholic opulence within the woven image and extend it beyond the picture plane. Glass beads adorn the top and bottom borders of the tapestries with shimmering fake gold that invokes the splendor and fall of the Catholic Empire. The decadence of this fallen majesty mirrors the sincerity of faith with the unnatural sensibilities of camp. These sensibilities, whether belonging to my grandmother’s domestic recreation of the Vatican or the exaggerated glamor of a drag queen, simultaneously engage queerness, ethnicity, and the sacred. (Courtesy of Patricia Sweetow Gallery)
About this Artist
John Paul Morabito
Transdisciplinary weaver John Paul Morabito engages queerness, ethnicity, and the sacred through the medium of tapestry reimagined in the digital age. They approach weaving as an ontological practice through which blasphemy, devotion, the incarnational spirit of Catholicism, the decadence of drag, and the impossibility of queer grace are bound as resonant sensibilities within their opulent tapestries. Morabito has exhibited at international venues including Patricia Sweetow Gallery (Los Angeles, CA); the Zhejiang Art Museum (Hangzhou City, China); the ;Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art (Winston-Salem, NC); CULT Aimee Friberg Exhibitions (San Francisco, CA); Dorsky Gallery Curatorial Projects (Long Island City, NY); Document (Chicago, IL); the Des Moines Art Center (Des Moines, IA); the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art (Overland Park, KS); the Center for Craft (Asheville, NC); and the John Michael Kohler Arts Center (Sheboygan, WI). Their work is represented in public and private collections including the Musée des maîtres et artisans…
View Full Artist Bio
Contact Us
For inquiries, comments, and acquisitions, please feel free to contact us any time. We welcome your input and conversation.
