Foxy Production presents P.E.A.C.E., JESSICA CIOCCI’s inaugural solo exhibition. Vivid and disturbing, Ciocci’s work explores the process of consumption through the examination of desire, incorporation and detritus. She appraises childhood as a time when individuals are psychically hardwired to consume, using a primitivist pig-like character as a primary motif to disarmingly critique the dynamics of demand, supply and surplus.
Employing at times a junk-store aesthetic that revels in a world of bric-a-brac, the unwanted and hidden treasures, Ciocci delves into the psychology of our emotional attachment to popular symbols, characters and narratives. Key to her approach is a profoundly intuitive re-presentation of the all-too-familiar as the uncanny.
A grandly–scaled fabric work combines everyday found textiles and repeated motifs, colors and patterning to produce an almost hypnotic effect that pushes figure and form to their limits. Together, diverse snapshot-like photographs – of Bart Simpson dolls, money blowing away on the street, a paper fish, an arm too close to the camera to be in focus – gel into a poignant, downcast whole. A series of collages, using fabric, paint, and found images of Barbie, pets and fairy tales, deftly explore the pleasures and terrors of the childhood experience. An animation-based print and a video use a flatness of texture and color, not unlike that of children’s cartoons, to create bright semi-abstract character-scapes that are undercut by an almost claustrophobic disquiet. A large acid-hued knitted yarn piece, comprising a number of individual panels, appears to be a totem to the pig-like figure, to venerate it, or perhaps, acting like a gargoyle, to ward off its potential for harm.