Senior Marianna La Rosa’s show in Fisher Hall, Arterial Meanderings, left a striking impression on gallery visitors last week. Comprised of a variety of drawings, paintings and sculptures, Arterial Meanderings is the culmination of a year’s work. La Rosa unceremoniously employs a number of unconventional but familiar materials to explore the human body and its inner workings.
The exhibition avoids an ironic detachment from content and departs into a more discreet form of self-expression. “In this work,” La Rosa said, “I have relied almost entirely on an intuitive sense of the internal in an attempt to speak of what I do know, what science and its systems can’t teach me.” Reminiscent of the eccentric process-art of Tim Hawkinson, Eva Hesse and Cy Twombly, La Rosa’s work is profound while maintaining a delicate elegance. The obviously personal handling of such powerfully tactile and suggestive materials like beeswax, plastic tubing, iron and rope establishes the importance of process and creation in art media. La Rosa’s works use layers and textures to create a distinctive system for understanding internal wholeness.
Certain works like the display “Invented Organs, dead weight and tension” appear to be informal sculptural arrangements at first, but are actually impressive abstractions of the internal body. While these pieces — made of intertwined rusty metals, frayed ropes and sterile plastic tubing — may seem invasive and brutal, they in fact suggest a casual innocence that quietly reclaims a unique physicality.
“I wonder at the mechanics of the body and my own ignorance of what exactly takes place,” La Rosa said. By playing with two- and three-dimensional attributes, La Rosa’s work succeeds at conveying the complexity of the internal body in a way that is both collective and personal.
Complementing this introspection on physicality, the works of Arterial Meanderings also incorporate the language and imagery of science. Their dispassionate and sober scientific elements create an interesting juxtaposition, hinting at the emotional and almost colloquial language of La Rosa’s abstractions. The exhibition does not try to comment on authoritarian forms of discourse about the human body. Instead, it looks at what elements stand together presented as a comprehensive organization of knowledge.
La Rosa said that Arterial Meanderings only represents about a quarter of her work. “This body of work is not the result of spontaneous thought,” she said, “but of an ongoing process that began at least four years ago.” La Rosa sees the work of the exhibition as neither an end nor a beginning to this process. The shape of La Rosa’s work is continually changing as she gathers new experiences and explores new arenas for self-expression.
La Rosa’s attitudes toward art, if not her actual artistic production, have been shaped by a variety of experiences. Last year, La Rosa worked with sculptural artist Maura Sheehan in Manhattan. With Sheehan, La Rosa learned to value the excitement of sheer creation while avoiding the trap of artistic self-absorption.Arterial Meanderings clearly makes a concerted effort to avoid this self-indulgence by standing somewhere between the personal and universal.
Recently La Rosa has worked closely with Oberlin College professor Nanette Yannuzzi-Macias, whose work La Rosa highly respects. Praising La Rosa’s skillful handling of a variety of media/materials/mediums and her eloquent treatment of abstract themes, Yannuzzi-Macias writes: “Marianna has created a visual language of symbols that invokes a passionate and rewarding dialogue between the viewer and her work.”
Starting this summer La Rosa will be working at the Massachusetts Museum for Contemporary Art. The unprecedented distinction of La Rosa’s Arterial Meanderings was so impressive, one only hopes for more to come.