Salvatore Arancio aims to create a sense of displacement in the view – a kind of temporal slip or disruption.
His first solo show, An Arrangement of the Materials Ejected, aims to achieve this with Everything Keeps Dissolving – stages of a large drawing combined with a sculptural soundpiece, which has been manipulated to a drone.
Salvatore’s signature medium is photo-etching, focusing on geological phenomenon, constructing new landscapes with an ancient edge, shifting context and perspective.
He’s also raided Dartmoor for his inspiration in the Exeter show, taking the granite Bowerman’s Nose as the subject of a large print, depicting a rock formation composed of stacks of weathered granite found on Dartmoor which is attached to a myth of veneration. Salvatore takes it out of context, adding to its mystery.
The mysterious mandrake root is also given the Salvatore treatment in a series of montype prints and a sculptural piece.
Further afield, he pulls his inspiration from a Native American tribe’s account of the creation of Mount Shasta in California for the split screen video installation Shasta.
In 2008 Salvatore told Contemporary Art Society: “my work explores the state of suspension between the real and the fictional through an emphasis on construction and staging.”
An Arrangement of the Materials Ejected is at the Spacex, Exeter until November 26.
(image: detail of Salvatore Arancio Bowerman’s Nose, Salvatore Arancio Courtesy: Federica Schiavo Gallery, Rome)
