Gleaned from the pages of food and design magazines, Tonia Di Risio’s new work is a series of collage installations consisting of fantastical landscapes and interiors that reflect on consumption, home décor and the labour of food preparation.
In a recent review, Zoë Chan writes of Di Risio’s work:
Although she indulges in the pleasures of juxtaposing random elements with a surrealistic emphasis on chance and a formalist focus on line and colour, Di Risio’s “mash-up” project is also inherently grounded in studying the rich language of food as both subject matter and signifier.
…
Di Risio creates direct parallels between the processes of cooking and art practices. The medium of collage lends itself particularly well to demonstrating this equivalence: the selection, combination, and transformation of seemingly incongruous “scraps” produce new “dishes” and, in so doing, prompt new tastes, meanings, and ways of engaging with the world.
esse arts + opinions, winter 2016
Assembled using traditional method of collage, her hand-cut works are disassembled, scanned, enlarged and installed directly onto the gallery walls. Wrapping around corners and stretching across walls, the sprawl of images moves beyond the constraints of paper edges and meanders through both real and imagined spaces.
