Visual Exploration
Type of Project: Branding, Logo Design, Wayfinding, Poster Design
Design Objective: Create a visual language and transform it into several different design responses.
Design Notes:
This project explores the idea of loneliness and desire.
It began with a series of photographs of found objects and over time it transformed into graphics, sculptures, poetry, and a design for a gallery show.
I took photos of around 80 objects discarded on the streets of Brooklyn and categorized and analyzed what I’d found. I used the most basic form of these objects to create three-dimensional sculptures to recreate value for these discards. I used a photo studio to play with the light and shadow and to bring the sculptures back into a two-dimensional world.
I created compositions with the original photograph, a gritty filtered version of the original, the geometric form, and the sculptural photograph. The three elements exist in different places in each composition so as not to be too static.
I created a poetry booklet to imagine the dreams of the original found objects and illustrations to accompany the poems.
The poems can live on their own but also pair with each composition.
Additionally, I designed a gallery show to exhibit my compositions and the accompanying poetry, and a gallery catalog. I used SketchUp to illustrate my vision for the gallery. The gallery layout is meant to be maze-like to allow visitors to find each object, recalling the origins of the project.
Gallery Press Release
Cellar Gallery is pleased to present Lost & Found, a solo exhibition of new work by Brooklyn artist and designer Mandy Licata. Transforming the gallery into an immersive environment of suspended poems and photographic stills, Licata’s compositions explore the particular loneliness of cities via the displacement of domestic objects to materialize understandings of our capitalistic and transient world.
Paired with each suspended poem is a photograph that captures a sculpture of wire and simple yellow yarn against an austere grey backdrop. The light plays on the sculptures creating shadows that echo across the landscape of the frame. The yellow string brings a certain softness to the sculptures as well as a juxtaposition to the wire. Connected to the photo of the sculpture are three related images—the first of which is a black and white capture of the object carelessly splayed and discarded on an urban sidewalk. The second is the photograph distorted by a gritty filter and the third component is the object rendered as a graphic shape. These ancillary images allow the visitor to further examine the object, its value, and even the geometric shapes of its parts.
The black and white photographs are the original source material and were collected while the artist went for a run every day during the transitional period between summer and autumn of 2020. Her process involves constructing sculptural replicas of found objects and staging scenes for the camera to capture, imbuing her prop-like objects with a captivating subjectivity. Each shadowy still life takes on an expressionist or even vaguely narrative quality. Once photographed, each mise en scène converts to a two-dimensional scale, flattened and decontextualized from its original environment.
The work interrogates the actions of the individual in the city as well as the setting of the city itself. The sidewalks of cities, especially that of New York, are places of transition and unceasing change. To leave a possession in this setting is to abandon it to purgatory. The work underscores the exceptionally contemporary isolation that can only ensue from living in a city of millions. Licata contrasts the emotive with the banal, for while evocative, the photographs feature old trampolines, hair ties, and chairs.
Licata delves into notions of preciousness, thoughtlessness, and collective amnesia; the human predilection to preserve memory and yet the human capacity to forget. Perhaps what we witness is a caricature of capitalist schizophrenia itself, an avatar of our improvident ways of being. Gesturing toward the ways we assess value, perceive surroundings, and dialogue with the city, we are ultimately prompted to question and evaluate the objects in our own lives.
Mandy Licata (b. Palm Springs, California) is a Brooklyn-based artist and designer. Her work has been exhibited at R/SF Projects (San Francisco, CA), VACATION (New York, NY), and internationally at Birthdays (United Kingdom). Licata received her MFA from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and her BA from the University of California, San Diego. Lost & Found is her premier solo exhibition with the gallery.