FOUL PLAY - an installation by Joseph Gerard Sabatino

It’s raw. It’s filth. It’s foul. Soft ground lies beneath your feet while vertical silk pods hover over you. Cold white walls attract sooty charcoal drawings as menacing elements corner you. Shredded rubber mulch smothers the floor and compresses into your soles. Your perspective is altered through multiple dimensions, blurring the line between fantasy and reality. Soot-like charcoal and graphite works blemish perfectly white walls. Industrial velvet cement is encased in sheaths of raw intestine using a meat grinder that both packs and penetrates sheer skin. Cement-filled, cocoon-like casings hang above from scattered, black silk strands, nearly assaulting you in the face. Part structural form, part drawing, and part architectural anomaly piercing space, FOUL PLAY is sure to confront and provoke.

FOUL PLAY combines crude industrial materials with elements of nature. This new body of work is the third overlapping themed installation created within the last two and a half years. In his current exhibition, the artist continues to explore the life cycle of the silkworm, it’s attraction to the mulberry tree and how its phase of life and death forms a natural continuum. Even with the caterpillar’s brief lifespan, the larva feeds and quickly grows. It ultimately spins silk threads around its protective shell, later becoming unwound by an individual, then eventually woven into a luscious silk fabric.

Biography: Joseph Gerard Sabatino began his journey as a photographer, but soon expanded into different materials and methods. After receiving his education from Montclair State University and Lorenzo di Medici Institute in Florence, Italy, Sabatino went on to exhibit in a variety of New York and New Jersey venues. Solo exhibitions include the Paterson Museum and The Dryfoos Gallery at Kean University. He has exhibited in Northern Kentucky University’s Underground Railroad exhibition and participated in Bittersweet: The Chocolate Show at Rutgers University. Sabatino was also selected to participate in three consecutive New Jersey Arts Annuals. Internationally, Sabatino has featured work in Florence, Italy as well as in Graz, Austria. The artist was a recipient of Aljira’s Emerge Artist Fellowship Program and was one of ten artists selected nationally for the William and Dorothy Yeck Award for Miami University’s “National Young Sculptors Competition”. His work has been reviewed or featured in The New York Times, The Herald News, ArtVoices Magazine, The Star-Ledger, The Record and The Jersey City Reporter. This summer Sabatino will install a public work at The Gateway Center II Causeway. He has upcoming solo shows at Solo(s) Project House (Newark,NJ) and R. Jampol Project(s) (NYC) in the fall of 2014.