James Viscardi

Gallery Affiliations: Last Resort Gallery, The Sunday Painter

Region: Northeast

I am preoccupied with wandering and tales of vagabonds. The subtle, steady movement of feet on the ground marching to the edge of what is known. I am a gold digger, a prankster, a role player, and a damn fool. Everything I have to give is here with me, from my bag of tricks to the shirt off my back. I am working toward bringing movement and passage into the static stillness of painting. I am creating my own abstracted visual language and tools by studying the visual storytelling methods of various cultures, particularly the highly refined methods of Japanese woodblock printmaking, ancient Inca embroidery, and the illuminated manuscripts of medieval Europe and the Middle East. I’ve mined fragments of gold from the detritus of history, grinding them into a fine dust and baking them into building blocks that I can use in my studio. They make Frankenstein amalgamations full of ragged scars and gaps in meaning. Where meaning slips into abstraction, viewers are free to enter and draw their own conclusions.