Artist Talk by Ray DiCapua
Wednesday, February 8, 2017
1:30 - 2:30 pm
Associate Professor of Sculpture and Drawing at UConn. In 2014, the Institute for Teaching and Learning named him a University Teaching Fellow, the highest teaching award given to faculty at the University of Connecticut.
Ray DiCapua currently makes large-scale, intricate drawings that investigate the intersections between imagery and processes of perception, recognition, and meaning making. He is curious about the psychological, political and contemplative tones that specific gestures, archetypal forms and cultural artifacts can arouse. He continues to expand on these themes through an interest in the phenomenology of experience as an art making praxis that explores the conditioned aspects of memory, thought and mind.
A two-time McDowell Colony resident, Ray DiCapua’s work has been further supported by awards, grants, fellowships and visiting artist engagements. Presently his work is being exhibited at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. as part of the 2016 Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition. Most recently, a one-person exhibition of selected drawings was installed at Kansas State University’s Chapman Gallery. Other recent exhibition venues include the Richmond Center for the Visual Arts, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, MI., and at the University of Mary Washington, Fredericksburg, VA.
On Making Art: In any moment of experience, there exists a profoundly complex weave of that which is personal (internal) and that which is structural (external). As I make these drawings, I am aware that I play the role of interpreter. The images I construct are reflections of the narratives, the lenses through which I look and in part, how I then construct meaning. The degree to which I am aware of this process is an important component to how and what the drawings ultimately communicate. The senses receive raw data. I am curious about how that raw data gets connected in the ways that it does and how it then turns it into story, history, and belief patterns, the experience of self and other our lived and imagined realities.
Research/Practice Interests: Integral Theory and Consciousness, Human Development and Creativity
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