CECILIA CALDIERA
Demand’s Only Form
October 14-December 10, 2023
Keystone 2
Mulberry paper, encaustic medium, collected paper, plastic, wood, ceramic
44 1⁄2 x 30 x 11”
2023
Keystone 1
Mulberry paper, encaustic medium, collected paper, plastic, wood, ceramic
44 1⁄2 x 30 x 11”
2023
Feel Like Spell
Wood, beeswax, stainless steel wire
35 x 40 x 10”
2023
Sidelong Mask
Mulberry paper, encaustic medium, rubber bands, copper, collected paper, sewing pins 19 1⁄2 x 11”
2023
Mind Your Shadow
Stainless steel, paper and encaustic medium
96 x 39” (Dimensions variable upon installation)
2023
Big Sky
Mulberry paper, encaustic medium, collected paper, plastic, wood
33 x 15”
2023
Constellation A (Standing Piece)
Steel, plastic, wood, paper, ceramics, penny, rubber band, collected paper
Standing piece: 76 1⁄2 x 52 1⁄4 x 11 1⁄2” (Dimensions variable upon installation)
2023
Exchange; Candles (Floor Piece)
Cement core samples, enamel paint, paper, encaustic medium, stainless steel
6 x 25 1⁄2 x 20”
2023
Thus, when traveling in the territory of Ersilia, you come upon the ruins of abandoned cities, without the walls which do not last, without the bones of the dead which the wind rolls away: spiderwebs of intricate relationships seeking form.
- Italo Calvino, “Invisible Cities”
The task of perception entails pulverizing the world, but also of spiritualizing its dust
- Gilles Deleuze, “The Fold”
Cecilia Caldiera’s works work like the strings of Calvino’s Ersilia: physical phrasings of relations unable to find expression through form but whose forms exist as the residue of relating. A line or its representation as a string, in this sense is not, actually. It is more like a calling toward or attending to connection.
The boundless cycle of living in a city under impossible conditions, destroying and building anew an entire world every red second while simultaneously singing its praises and exalting its very process is the plight of being a being in a metropolis with terminal sensitivity. By spiritualizing its dust, Caldiera calls attention to those strings of connectivity, dignifies their accumulation without hierarchy and reveals them as the exact constituency which forms our dear city. In short, we are it and they are us.
Caldiera once said, “We have been here before” which brings to mind a tumbleweed, a diaspore who, through death, becomes mobile and fecund. The tumbleweed’s cyclical condition is one of traveling, picking up but also putting down; a narrator without specific subjectivity, a witness and a participant among the process of building (a viewer?). The tumbleweed’s equal and opposite partner is the trap; set to attract, but once approached flipped instantly, turning the perceived answer back to question, snapping back as the part tumbles forward.
Caldiera’s work could be the string that holds the trap in a constant state of potential by drawing a line between that which we desire and our world who created and disposed of it at all. Or, perhaps it could be the tumbleweed, dying to tell the tale.
Cecilia Caldiera is a New York City-based interdisciplinary artist. Using sculpture, printmaking, and ephemeral installation, she explores relationships among people, public space, time, and value. In her work, found objects are integrated into precarious new systems that challenge hierarchies of matter, recontextualizing local histories and sites’ material life with play and resilience. Cecilia graduated from Pratt Institute with a BFA in 2013 and an MFA from Columbia University School of the Arts in 2023, and she currently teaches at Pratt and the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop.