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THE EDGE OF THE WORLD - Works by Claudia Fitch - 2010 exhibition
THE EDGE OF THE WORLD was a club in the 1980’s located in the DMZ in NYC’s lower east side. A former big-time catering hall, its bombed-out, cavernous, ballroom interiors still donned pieces of the original décor: exposed concrete walls with startlingly luscious remnants of draped satin. A truly postmodern environment, briefly fashionable, the club came to a violent end (the owner was found murdered on a ballroom balcony). My fond memory of a night dancing at the club surfaced while making a drawing of an elaborate 17th century Sicilian interior. The memory merged with my efforts to render, with as much authenticity as possible, the details of Sicilian cherubs with drapery. Titled THE EDGE OF THE WORLD, this drawing, and others in the exhibit, contemplates the paradoxical relationship between surface decor and deep space, between the broadly cultural and specifically personal, and between historical opulence and its destruction within contemporary time.
INTERIORS WITH STATUETTES also examines illusion and it material realities, illustrating in pencil and large format paper, the self-portrait ceramic figurines within various hypothetical and absurdly elaborate contexts. In both subject and process, the grandiose is reconciled with the modest.
As a series of drawings inspired by palatial interiors of old architectural renderings, Victorian photographs, and a recurring dream, INTERIORS considers the palace image as a quirky cosmological symbol of one’s interior life – for example, the ceiling and the celestial share a common realm. In the midst of the palace stands the statuette protagonist: modest, slightly overweight, placed and displaced within her context.
—Claudia Fitch
Artist Statement
My work in drawing and sculpture playfully re-invents icons familiar in pop culture and art history, reconciling the tropes and conventions of culture within a viscerally felt, personal language. The commonly understood images of "objects of significance" (such as the Scholar's Rock, the bronze Minoan figurines, the antique furniture) fascinate me as subjects simultaneously banal and persuasive, congruent and incongruent within the larger context of urban life. Their often decorative but loaded presence continues to open up the rich, curiously entwined relationship between the historical and the personal, the cultural icon and the human desire to possess or embody it in some form. Re-iterating the formal iconography of these objects through the process of drawing, and through unexpected shifts in context, scale and material elements, my work seeks to displace the familiar with the unfamiliar, and to disclose a potentially marvelous and idiosyncratic integrity between expected social form and a more subconscious visceral reality.
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