Gallery

Keepsake The scrolls represent not only an early form of containment of the written word, but their very form is secretive in nature. The words are tucked deep inside, almost like preconscious thought itself. They could be anything. Just as the stories we write and the lives we recall.
Elements: Porcelain, handmade paper, Japanese cloth, vintage notions and ephemera, encaustic.

The Quiet Speaks for Itself Elements: Porcelain, handmade paper, vintage ephemera

Collage with Copper and Wire A donation to the 10″x10″ fundraising exhibit for AVA Gallery in Lebanon, New Hampshire

A Mezuzah for the Uninitiated

Currently on display at Artistree Gallery, Unbound Vll Exhibit. Elements: Porcelain, handmade paper, vintage notions and ephemera, encaustic, original text.

©All images and text are the sole property of the artist, photo acknowlegment: Ben DeFlorio

From Memory’s Unreliable Files

From Memory’s Unreliable Files:The scrolls represent not only an early form of containment of the written word, but their very form is secretive in nature. The words are tucked deep inside, almost like preconscious thought itself. They could be anything. Just as the stories we write and the lives we recall. First Place “Unbound Vll” book arts exhibit.

©All images and text are the sole property of the artist, photo acknowlegment: Ben DeFlorio

Episodic

In this accordion styled booklet, brief units of action, integral to but separable from a continuous narrative, unfold in vintage envelopes inherited from the basement of a friend who suddenly died. Each a collage in which, as journalist Jacob Silverman describes the non-fiction of writer David Shields, “tiny paragraph-units work together to project a linear motion.” In this case, each is a tiny vignette, an episode of its own. Elements: Vintage papers, inks, original texts.

©All images and text are the sole property of the artist, photo acknowlegment: Ben DeFlorio

Unsent

Blank translucent porcelain pages. The viewer reads into, projects their own thoughts. Elements: Porcelain,wire, vintage buttons.

©All images and text are the sole property of the artist, photo acknowlegment: Ben DeFlorio

VooDoo Views at the Memory Motel

Exploring here what I call the  “Three Dimensional Art of Memoir” and issues of transparency, translucency, opacity via porcelain, various handmade papers, fabric, threads, charms, milagros, encaustic, ephemera, original artwork and text as the basis for the written word, also incorporating micro-essays, quotes and pieces of memoir via vintage Letra-Set, stamps, and inkjet printing. And Voo-doo.

Piece featured on the Brevity.com website: https://brevity.wordpress.com/2015/07/21/memoir_vessels/

©All images and text are the sole property of the artist, photo acknowledgment: Ben DeFlorio

Grandma’s Button Book

A soft fabric accordion reminiscent of our earliest books. Elements: all fabric, buttons, notions from my grandmother’s aprons, crochet, found in the tins she stored it all in.

©All images and text are the sole property of the artist, photo acknowlegment: Ben DeFlorio

My Mother’s Hankies

Soft accordion book filled with vintage hankies and other notions belonging to my mother.

©All images and text are the sole property of the artist, photo acknowledgment: Ben DeFlorio

When I Was Japanese

When I Was Japanese is from a series which explores the follies of youth, the issues of regret and loss, and how we ultimately incorporate these into the essence of who we are to become. The series of four vessels, When I was Japanese includes the titles:

“500 Bowls,” “Guilt vs Shame,” “Imperfection” and “Mottaini.” Materials include “Frost”- a translucent porcelain, handmade papers and ephemera, fabric, encaustic, original text, and photographs. 

finalist in the 2016 The Diagram essay competition:

http://thediagram.com/16_6/gaby.html

©All images and text are the sole property of the artist, photo acknowledgment: Ben DeFlorio

If Counting Could Betray Disaster

Can the visual expression of a narrative make that narrative more physically beautiful, as I try to accomplish in “If Counting Could Betray Disaster,” from the lyric memoir of the same name? Elements: Found vintage tool box, gravel, porcelain slip, wax transfer, found ephemera, handmade paper, original text.

©All images and text are the sole property of the artist, photo acknowledgment: Ben DeFlorio

Shard Poems

 Smoked earthenware, rusted wire, encaustic.

©All images and text are the sole property of the artist, photo acknowledgment: Ben DeFlorio

Mixed metaphor  a.- f.

Accordion pocket style book. Elements: Porcelain, Fimo, Japanese cloth, ephemera.

©All images and text are the sole property of the artist, photo acknowledgment: Ben DeFlorio

Post-Literate II

The book elements of pages bound with wire “hinges” and samplers of Asemic based text in glassine envelopes.

©All images and text are the sole property of the artist, photo acknowledgment: Ben DeFlorio

Origins

Combines the concrete and primal elements of bone, eggshell, shards of letters with the  developmental hybridization to the sophisticated materials of porcelain and chalk, much in the way we have developed thought and language. The funeral pyre represents the subtext of environmental loss.

©All images and text are the sole property of the artist, photo acknowledgment: Ben DeFlorio

Three Silences

Porcelain scrolls unfurled. This image added by iPhone taken by artist.

Mojo Memoir: Stories of Luck and Poison

Mixed media on display at AVA Gallery, Lebanon, NH. This image added by iPhone by the artist.