February 15, 2019 to March 17, 2019

Opening reception February 15th 6:00 to 8:00pm

This is an exhibition confronting the work of durational mourning.

Displaying a body of work with pieces from 2011 to the present day, What it Feels Like presents a series of mourning objects created by artist Angela Simione.  

Beginning with the weight of grief coupled with a desire for comfort, Simione began to crochet a solid black sweater with infinite, dragging sleeves– the first work she created following her mother’s early death.  The time, labor, and mentally meditative space, as well as warm, tactile material qualities all combine in this body to produce a series of contemplative memorials, wearable shrines, and expansive fields of eternal flowers. Her work is never done– it never ends– but grows and becomes part of her own personal fabric.  

Invested in the process and history of grief in the USA, Simione focuses on a lost mourning material: clothing, an historically mobile, transitional signifier of grief.  Black ‘Widow’s Weeds’ style English morning customs were adopted by colonists in seventeenth century America; for women this included heavy, concealing, black clothing and veils– but  contemporary American grief rituals look nothing like those practiced 200 years ago. Today, mourning is sterilized and forced into liminal spaces and places. The act of mourning in America denies the body and has created bodiless funerary rituals.  Without a corpse, objects begin to take on the personality of the dead. Angela Simione’s work attempts to combat the depersonalized, bodiless elements of contemporary grief and loss. Yet her work also reminds viewers of the emptiness and lack of a body in our own mourning culture. Thick and suffocating, yet comforting and warm, her crocheted works impart the duality of loss; the desire for comfort, touch, and interaction, and the heavy reality of loss, loneliness, and absence.