curated by 2024 - You Don’t Go Anywhere

You Don’t Go Anywhere is the first solo exhibition in Europe by Lydia Ricci (born and raised in Pennsylvania). Exiguous, her sculptures are made from discarded materials and debris salvaged from an infinity of objects accumulated by her family for over thirty years. These sculptures are the result of dilated time that seems to function like Proustian memory. Lydia Ricci’s works are familiar because they reflect the way we exist and relate to the world. They are real-not-real reworkings of objects, small, even useless, mostly miniature things. They live in contingency. That is why they are melancholic, bittersweet and imperfect. They are also a reflection of the stasis of existence that we have shaped according to constructed feelings, to which we have forcibly attached forms, places, labels.

Lydia Ricci fabricates her objects with maniacal care, zeroing the scalar difference between her and them: they exist in relation to her gaze, which is divorced from dimensional scales and specs. This is why she photographs her sculptures in tableaux that distort the criteria of size and transport the objects into a time which lives in a feeble memory. From this dense dialogue she weaves daily with these things, she develops a series of animations that beyond visual divertissement conceal a discomfort pertinent to everyday, domestic life. Before they are static, her objects are thought of in motion, in a dialogue on par with our existence, so the textual fragments in each multimedia production function like the punctum of a photograph, they become fundamental remnants of thought that overpower objects and images.

Objects inhabit our lives because we decide so, until they become part of our own physical and mental landscape. Things remain if we continue to give them a space in which to exist, whether they are rooms or mnemonic archives, as opposed to us. And it is precisely this attitude, at times manic, to accumulate and occupy the space surrounding our infinitesimal existences that relegates us to a condition of paralysis. We never really go anywhere.

Eleonora Milani

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LYDIA RICCI

Education

Carnegie Mellon University, PITTSBURGH, PA BFA Graphic Design 1991-1995

Schule für Gestaltung, ST GALLEN, SWITZERLAND Graphic Design Spring 1994

also:
University of the Arts, PHILADELPHIA, PA Holga Photography Summer 2013

University of Georgia, CORTONA, ITALY Printmaking Summer 1998, 2000

Exhibitions

DES MOINES ART CENTER
Group Exhibit / October 2023 - January 2024

COVE STREET ARTS
Group Exhibit / September 2023 - November 2024

WOMEN’S STUDIO WORKSHOP
Group Exhibit / July 2023 - September 2023

BERMAN MUSEUM OF ART
Exhibit / January 2022 - April 2023

JOHN MICHAEL KOHLER ARTS CENTER Exhibit / Aug 2022 - February 2023

SMALL IS BEAUTIFUL
Group Exhibit / January 2022 - May 2023

JAMES OLIVER GALLERY Group Show / March 2022

I WILL ALWAYS LOVE YOU
PARADIGMA GALLERY Solo Show / March 2021

TELLING STORIES FROM SCRAPS
Philadelphia International Airport Exhibit / Nov 2019 - May 2020

HOPELESSLY DEVOTED TO YOU
Conduit Gallery / DALLAS
The Project Room / Dec 2019 - Jan 2020

COME TALK TO ME
Huddle / PHILADELPHIA Solo Show / July 2020

PULP & PROCESS
Society of Arts + Crafts / Boston Group show / February - April 2019

FASTER, FASTER!
The Art of Motorcycle Culture Wignall Museum of Contemporary Art Group Show / March 2019

OBJECTS IN MIRROR ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR Wrong Marfa / TX
Solo Show / February - April 2019

DON’T YOU FORGET ABOUT ME
Morris Adjmi Architect / NY Solo Show / June 2018

MOST INCLINED
Space 1026 / Philadelphia Group Show / May 2018

BADASS MINIATURES
D. Thomas Fine Miniatures / COLD SPRING, NY Group Show / May 2018

PIECEMEAL
The Indianapolis Art Center Group Show / February 2018

UNLISTED
The Ice Box Project Space / PHILADELPHIA Group Show / 2016

Experience

Adjunct Professor
SCHOOL OF DESIGN
University of the Arts 2010 – 2024

Designer BRANDING, PACKAGING, BOOKS & MARKETING
Clients included: Chronicle Books, Bank of America, Bare Escentuals, QVC, Juice Beauty, Aramark Introduction Design Studio 1998 – 2018

Podcast & Film Producer BRANDING & MARKETING, PRODUCTION
Roam Schooled 2015- 2019 At the Video Store 2017-2019 OH, DENISE! (in production)

Recent Press

An Artist’s Miniature Monuments to Big Memories

Hyperallergic

Everyday objects sculpted from scraps – in pictures

The Guardian Mother Tongue Jerry Saltz LadyCult

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Eleonora Milani is an art historian, writer and editor based in Rome. She formerly worked as an editor for Flash Art magazine from 2016 to 2023, and as a managing editor from 2019 to 2023 at both editions, International and Italian. She teaches “Critical Writing” at the MA in Visual Studies and Curatorial Practices at NABA – Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti, Rome; previously she held the same course at NABA Milano (2019–2022). She is contributing writer to Spike Art Magazine and 032c (forthcoming). Her research investigates practices that refer to time-based media and performance art in institutional space. Her research is evolving as a curatorial practice; she recently curated a group show “intergenerational forms” for Galleria Francesca Minini, Milano (May–July 2024).