PRESS RELEASE
Katherine Mitchell DiRico’s solo exhibition Instruments of Synesthesia explores how today's constant connectivity affects sense perception. Hovering between drawing and sculpture, sound and vibration, these tightly-wound works prompt intimate negotiations with visibility, location, tension, finity--even rationality. Choreographing their own unique data stream, they reflect a networked world in which nothing is ever turned off and a state of rest can never be achieved.
Instruments of Synesthesia employs disparate materials to create an immersive environment that is at once synchronous and simultaneous, yet out of sync. Works accrue from the floor, the walls and the ceiling to manifest the tangle of invisible forces--white noise, endless feeds, unread threads in the airwaves that tether our bodies and minds. Bright orange filament clusters as tiny explosions. Taut lines bend to the breaking point. Weblike shadows draw us in and hold our own silhouettes. Sound bleeds in fits and starts, slipping in and out of decipherable narratives. Sensors reflect our presence as a vibrating hum. Surveillance mirrors glare back at us.
Together, the work embodies a sense that something is being tracked--something in its volume and pervasiveness that can never be fully known. This volume is tethered only by a thread pinned to the floor, a metaphorical and impossibly literal stress point. Instruments of Synesthesia offers a quiet response to the immense machinations of the systems and technology that socially mediates, and envelops the body politic, one download at a time.
BIO
Katherine Mitchell DiRico uses drawing, sculpture, light, and sound elements to create multimedia installations that investigate how we negotiate connectivity and sense perception in today’s networked world.
Solo exhibitions include the Abigail Ogilvy Gallery in Boston, MA, Carol Schlosberg Alumni Gallery at Montserrat College of Art, Beverly, MA; Five Seven Delle Project Space, Boston, MA; and Porcelynne Gallery, San Francisco, CA. Selected group exhibitions include Edinburgh College of Art; Stockwell Studios in London; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Grossman Gallery at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, and the Massachusetts Campus Compact Conference on Civic Engagement, all in Boston, MA; SOMArts Cultural Center, 66balmy Gallery, and Crucible Steel Gallery, all in San Francisco, CA; and the September Gallery, Hudson, NY.
Mitchell DiRico was awarded the Montague Travel Grant and the President’s Research Grant from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, and the 2018 Walter Feldman Fellowship from the Arts & Business Council of Greater Boston, juried by curator Jen Mergel. She holds a BA from Smith College and the University of Dakar, Senegal, and an MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts.
