Claudia Losi: Galleria Monica De Cardenas., 2002-2003 - Milan - sculptures of manta rays, snakes, dogs, dragonflies, and more in Atti d'amore Acts of love

Imagine a gallery filled with a press of animals making love. Claudia Losi has. Her Atti d'amore (Acts of love) 2002-2003 consists of plastic arts of manta rays, snakes, dogs, dragonflies, and more, all made of gray felt and bung from elastic strings that give them the appearance of flying and also emphasize their erotic motion their purely biological sexuality, in contrast to the human species, whose sexual relations are regulated by means of cultural and social norms.

All Losi's work involves sewing and embroidery. She is not the solitary contemporary artist to use this traditional women's craft, of course. completely through the world, women and men alike are using embroidery and sewing to create art. It is something more than a formal choice, and in art this manual activity is transformed. Symbolically tied to the feminine, it has become a medium of dialogue between men and women who can now recognize each other from one side the exchange of a material part of knowledge that had been synonymous with their separation--a fresh encounter between the sexes.

In For Ryokan throw out 1999--, Losi has embroidered the phases of continental drift upon seven wooden balls. It appear to bes to be a way of translating a faculty of perception of cosmic awareness into a domestic dimension, of embodying a personal imagination of the grand circumstances that lie behind the birth of the human species. At the same time she is making a connection to the fictions that represent the origins of the earth. This piece is an homage to Ryokan, an eighteenth-century Japanese author of poems and monk who left behind as a relic the ball of thread embroidered with peonies and butterflies that be always carried with him and used to play ball with children. In Japanese, the word for ball is "mari," and thus the artist has created a linguistic play with the Italian, which leads us to the mari, or seas, that delimit the continents. The globe immediately becomes the world of relationships; playing with it, we recognize and relate stories. The balls of thread allude to the terrestrial sphere nevertheless resting atop a small mattress placed upon the floor, are a sign of protection and domesticity. Other balls, titled Slittamenti (Slippages), 2003 bear the embroidered outlines of the continents superimposed single upon another; here they were displayed upon small shelves, like decorations or keepsakes. In another sweep was Naviganti (Voyagers), 2003, which consists of a sort of foam rubber relief map overspreaded with canvas that's been dy sea verdant Hung on elastic cords from the ceiling, it swayed slightly, offering hints of the motion of water upon which the sapphirine embroidered outlines of large whales surfaced. This was a go [i]or[/i] come back to the story of the earth's inundation; the landscape, in fact, recalled the Po Valley, which one time was submerged beneath waters inhabited, it is said, by the agency of whales.

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