http://cristinadegennaro.com/

Sage Drawing, 2014, Acrylic ink on mylar, 9 panels, 12”X16” ea., 43”X42” overall
BIO
Cristina de Gennaro has exhibited her visual art work, videos, and performances in museums and galleries nationally including the Glyndor Gallery at Wave Hill (Bronx, NY), Nexus Contemporary Art Center (Atlanta, GA), the Portland Art Museum (Portland, OR), Dallas Museum of Art (Dallas, TX), San Antonio Museum of Art (San Antonio, TX), The Women's Building (Los Angeles, CA), and the Center on Contemporary Art (Seattle, WA). She has received national and regional awards including an NEA.  She has been the recipient of artist residency fellowships at the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation (Taos, NM), the Fundacion Valparaiso (Almeria, Spain), The Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts (Ithaca, NY), the Jentel Foundation (Banner, WY) and she was a visiting artist at the American Academy in Rome (Rome, Italy) and the GlogauAIR Residency Program (Berlin, Germany).
STATEMENT
While hiking the high desert in Taos, New Mexico, I became fascinated with the forms of eroding sage bushes as they decompose back into the earth.  The serpentine forms embody the concept of entropy, the tendency of living things to change from a state of order and growth to one of disorder and dissolution.  These are images of decay and yet I find that they are filled with movement, pattern, grace, and beauty.  As such, the drawings explore the tensions between order and disorder, pattern and complexity, beauty and chaos.
The drawings are on translucent mylar and I layer them in installations to reinforce the depth of the tangled, twisted shapes while resisting the contained order of the grid-like structures.  I’ve cropped the images so that the forms in the drawings are abstracted and ambiguous, simultaneously reminiscent of both root systems and microscopic bodily vessels.