VICTORIA DEBLASSIE

For this project I reflected on our relationship to the inside and outside world after being in quarantine for months and how social pressures of maintaining one’s best aesthetic self were peeled back due to the fact that upholding patriarchal standards of female body maintenance were no longer a quotidian necessity. I used tanned orange peels and ground orange peels and turned them into objects and cosmetics that I commonly use to make myself beautiful before leaving the house. I chose to work with the orange peel not only because it is a material that I have worked with for a long time, but also because the peel of the orange is the closest surface to human skin and it also talks about the relationship to the internal and external as the white part faces the inside of the fruit and the orange part faces the outside world. Furthermore, the orange is both an object and a color, and like beauty is simultaneously concrete and abstract. The objects I created are used for beautification, but in contrast the way I made them makes them look bodily, unsightly, and unattractive. By creating these corporeal products my aim was to critique my own love/hate relationship with these objects as well as further feminists critiques of adhering to a patriarchally defined concept of female beauty and question how even the quotidian act of presenting oneself to the world is silently dictated by hierarchical power structures that can be easily disrupted by basic global events as well as personal choice. Being in quarantine instigated a period of profound investigation concerning the importance placed on presentation and how it’s both abstract and concrete yet materialistically epitomized by these objects.

I discovered the book, “L' arte di annacarsi. Un viaggio in Sicilia” by the Palermitano reporter Roberto Alajmo at the Bridge Art Residency, the theme of which was the theatre of hospitality. There are many definitions of “annacarsi” in Sicilian, but the one I reference is “all talk and no action.” For me this is the perfect expression for the human impact on the environment. There is an awareness of the damage created and yet no action is ever taken and for this reason, I made work connected to humankinds’ interaction between land and sea. I collected tossed-out tiles that had eroded on the Marzamemi seaside and crocheted them together using twine to mimic both a fisherman’s net and the net-like form the Sicilian cacti take when dry. There is also a clear connection to the importance of making what we need by hand via the use of crocheting and the embroidery hoop, an act that would eliminate over-production of unnecessary objects. By creating these connections, I hope to inspire considerations about how the human neglect of our environment will result with us only being guests on the earth.

This body of work explores the history of colonization both done to and by Portugal as represented by its flora. Using source imagery I found from the Ethnographic Museum of Messejana, Portugal, I laser-cut: images of boats on laminated Bougainvillea petals and watermelon peels; images of Arabic writings on stone tablets onto laminated orange and lemon peels; images of the ocean seen in children’s books onto cantaloupe peels; images of colonial lace patterns onto laminated Bougainvillea petals. By integrating the selected imagery with the chosen material, I aim to connect matter, territory and history into cryptic symbols to reveal that even the simplest of material we experience everyday has origins in events that forever reshaped the local terrain and present-day ways of life. This work investigates the boundary between discovery and knowledge, and colonization and usurpation, like the boundary between the known and the unknown, where wanting to understand more about the world turns into wanting to dominate more of the world. In my act of transforming organic vegetation, I explore the tension between the colonizer and colonized mindset and relate it to the current globalized world. In creating work that has a clear link between the past and the present, I question historical colonization and create links to the present to encourage conversations surrounding post-colonization and neo-colonization in order to promote a dialogue that critiques our current globalized world.

The term navel-gazing has both a positive and a negative connotation. Once used as an expression to mean profound introspection of one’s position in the world, it now means being egotistical or too introspective. I use this notion to reflect on our current environmental crisis and on how mankind has been egotistical in terms of its deleterious impact on the environment. By absurdly pairing this notion of navel-gazing with something as commonplace as oranges that have human references that call to mind elements of the human body like skin, hair, and bellybuttons, I am aiming to create an awareness of the simple things in life that can be taken for granted as well as create a link between our bodies and how we perceive the world through our five senses and how even our senses can become impaired due to the pollution that we have created. By creating a relationship with the human body, I aim to create a larger awareness of how we can change our navel-gazing ways that have led to an environmental crisis, to recalibrate our navel-gazing so that, if we must gaze at our navels, we are looking into them for a larger purpose.

Each Moment, Your Body Shines through/ En cada moment, el teu cos brilla a través de tot is a series of gouache works I painted on top of paper I made using Castilian newspapers while an artist in residence at Harngar.org in Barcelona. I painted some of the most important organs and bones in the body related to speech, reading, and written language. The organ and bone diagrams are all written in Catalan, so that there is a Catalan body floating on a Castilian background, a Catalan voice swimming but taking form in a textual maze of Castilian so that it remains unclear if there is coexistence or if one is drowning out the other.

I made A Silent but Oral History of Catalunya Triptych / Una història silenciosa però oral de Catalunya Tríptic as an artist in residence at Hangar.org in Barcelona. This triptych was created by using both Catalan and Castilian newspapers to create a fully formed new paper of massive proportions reflecting the linguistic diversity as well as linguistic tension of Catalunya, an oral history on paper. The left piece of the triptych was created using Castillian newspapers; the middle one was made using both Catalan and Castillian newspapers; and the right one was made using only Catalan newspapers. The use of dirt in the pieces of the triptych featuring Catalan references not only the notion of land and territory from which a language comes and positions language as something culturally rooted or sedimented within a place and a person, but it also references agriculture and the important role farmers have played in social movements and revolutions in Catalunya and elsewhere.

In Boxer: Cavalcare sul Cavalletto I created a horse saddle from tanned and dyed oranges peels that are stitched together like the lanes of a horse track where jockeys compete to win races. I put this saddle I on an oversized saw-horse to suggest a horse’s body. The title references the carthorse Boxer from Orwell’s Animal Farm who always continued to work as hard as he could with a blind trust in authority. Upon his death, the pigs in charge sold his remains to a glue factory and said he died a noble death. Moreover, the notion of “calvalcare sul cavalletto” or “riding on a saw horse” in English recalls the failed noble and quixotic acts of Cervantes’s famous character Don Quixote where his imagined enemies are in fact windmills, believing in his delusional version of reality and using that to extract sensations of nobleness, heroism, purpose, and order. These two characters represent the folly of blind effort and labor as ultimate sources of a life well lived, even if that means working for a socially destructive system. My own use of labor in creating this artwork teeters on the faithful idealism of Don Quixote and Boxer as well as the fearful confrontations of the unknown when boundaries are pushed as tanning orange peels is a process I invented whose ends are unknown, which is the same spirit that is required in questioning authority. I use these literary references to show that much can be learned even through a bad example, acknowledging that even in these tense current political times, every generation has had its struggles and that it is just as vital now as in the past to question authority in all its forms and remain vigilant against the idealistic myths of our times concerning power, heroism, nobility, righteousness, and goodness.

In the Giardino di Boboli Orange Wrapper series I stitched tanned orange peels into the forms that are meant to reflect shape and size of the parchment paper of orange peel wrappers that can be found in outdoor Italian markets and I have intricately overlaid patterns representing and showing the famous Italian Renaissance garden “Il Giardino di Boboli.”

I have created a large cascade-like unfurling of tanned orange peels that can seem like an endlessly unrolling red carpet that reflects the characteristic small garden-based waterfalls common in many of the Italian Renaissance gardens.

In the Villa series, I also applied these historic garden designs to the red plastic mesh bags that contain bulk oranges, which can be found in the Italian supermarket, Esselunga.

I collected the orange peels from various restaurants and smoothie shops in San Francisco. I preserved the orange peels by drying them and then I hand and machine stitched them together. I lathered the stitched layers with wood glue and then compressed them with a wooden press. Intrigued by the various geographical origins shown on the brand stickers of the peels I collected, I decided to craft the orange peel plywood into boxes that reference containers and the Cartesian grids found on maps in order to reflect the diversity of where the oranges came from and encourage the audience to think about where our food comes from.

In 2003, I began collecting, preserving, and sewing peels from oranges that my family and I consumed. I was infatuated with the warmth, color, and odor of the fruit. In 2007, I started collecting fruit peels and coconuts shells from friends and strangers, while other peels were collected from local restaurants and from a yoga studio. The discarded fruit skins and coconut shells appeal to me because independent of their protective function, these materials have sculptural potential. By stitching peels together, I could stretch the potential of color, texture, and form to create skin sculptures absent of a body. My process of accumulating and conserving the peels is both a metaphorical way of preserving relationships and a marker of the passage of time.

In 2003, I began collecting, preserving, and sewing peels from oranges that my family and I consumed. I was infatuated with the warmth, color, and odor of the fruit. In 2007, I started collecting fruit peels and coconuts shells from friends and strangers, while other peels were collected from local restaurants and from a yoga studio. The discarded fruit skins and coconut shells appeal to me because independent of their protective function, these materials have sculptural potential. By stitching peels together, I could stretch the potential of color, texture, and form to create skin sculptures absent of a body. My process of accumulating and conserving the peels is both a metaphorical way of preserving relationships and a marker of the passage of time.

In 2003, I began collecting, preserving, and sewing peels from oranges that my family and I consumed. I was infatuated with the warmth, color, and odor of the fruit. In 2007, I started collecting fruit peels and coconuts shells from friends and strangers, while other peels were collected from local restaurants and from a yoga studio. The discarded fruit skins and coconut shells appeal to me because independent of their protective function, these materials have sculptural potential. By stitching peels together, I could stretch the potential of color, texture, and form to create skin sculptures absent of a body. My process of accumulating and conserving the peels is both a metaphorical way of preserving relationships and a marker of the passage of time.

In 2003, I began collecting, preserving, and sewing peels from oranges that my family and I consumed. I was infatuated with the warmth, color, and odor of the fruit. In 2007, I started collecting fruit peels and coconuts shells from friends and strangers, while other peels were collected from local restaurants and from a yoga studio. The discarded fruit skins and coconut shells appeal to me because independent of their protective function, these materials have sculptural potential. By stitching peels together, I could stretch the potential of color, texture, and form to create skin sculptures absent of a body. My process of accumulating and conserving the peels is both a metaphorical way of preserving relationships and a marker of the passage of time.

In 2003, I began collecting, preserving, and sewing peels from oranges that my family and I consumed. I was infatuated with the warmth, color, and odor of the fruit. In 2007, I started collecting fruit peels and coconuts shells from friends and strangers, while other peels were collected from local restaurants and from a yoga studio. The discarded fruit skins and coconut shells appeal to me because independent of their protective function, these materials have sculptural potential. By stitching peels together, I could stretch the potential of color, texture, and form to create skin sculptures absent of a body. My process of accumulating and conserving the peels is both a metaphorical way of preserving relationships and a marker of the passage of time.

This series was one of the first inspirations for my "Alchemical Orange Project" in Florence, Italy.

From 2003-2009 I domestically collected orange peels to create the hand-stitched Orange Peel Accumulation Series.