Corners Constrict the Mind Opening Reception
Multidisciplinary artist Nate Ricciuto’s recent work embraces the restlessness and irreverence of tinkering, an activity that eschews the wisdom of established systems and favors playful intervention and disruption. These projects reconsider narratives of progress and resistance and seek to build experiences that conjure idealistic, radical, and flawed visions of the future. He is curious about the practicality and optimism of craft, exploring the possibility that the way we make things is an extension of our beliefs, desires, and doubts. Perhaps imagination is not only a reflection of the things we hope to control, but also those things that control us. Combining carefully crafted objects, homespun ingenuity, and intuitive approaches, Ricciuto creates situations and spaces that entertain paranoid sentiments and invite myopic fantasies of self-reliance and escape.
Inspired by affinities between fringe beliefs, handmade structures, and alternative worldviews, Ricciuto’s projects probe material relationships and perceptual slippages in reflecting and amplifying an atmosphere of uncertainty, distortion, and everyday absurdity. These objects and environments hope to evoke the potential of both isolation and hyper-connectivity in cultivating delusional and speculative attitudes, casting sideways glances toward the growing prevalence of competing and contradictory versions of reality.
Corners Constrict the Mind includes:
Two Points on a Curved Surface, a collection of household items and repurposed objects that is loosely based on amateur experiments to measure the divergence of beams of sunlight in hopes of proving aspects of Flat Earth theory.
Solar Still, a durational project made of wood, mirrors, glass, acrylic, PVC tubing, bottles, pond water, a bucket, and sunlight that focused on a simple contraption using solar energy to distill water from a nearby pond into a purified, drinkable substance. Each day’s distillate was collected, bottled and consumed, allowing participants to consider their engagement with time, environment, and resources.
Bellwether, a project that grew out of a collaboration with a manufacturer of architectural and automotive specialty glass. This work makes use of conductive glass panels to create a Faraday enclosure to shield the interior from radio and wireless signal interference.
