"For Your Safety: RED (Self Portrait)" CSP, 2020
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Who is WhiteWillowTea:
Z Fondanarosa was born into the world on a cold January night in 1998. They currently live and work in San Francisco, CA. Z has a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Their artwork is concentrated in (but not limited to) film, illustration, painting, dance, and both poetic and creative writing. Their work centers around the Hellenic religion and its interactions with Christianity. They also focuses on how spirituality interacts with mental illness and disability. Much of Z’s work also contains elements of queer trauma, both of the collective and personal kind. Z has shown their work at Gene Siskel Film Center, Chicago(2020), The Disability and Learning Resource at SAIC, Chicago(2020), Free Range a Chicago Art Gallery(2018) and Blick Art stores(2015) and has performed an artist lecture at its New York location(2016). Z also has been a panelist for SAIC’s DLRC’s “Disability and Belong” Spring lecture(2018). | ||||||
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What is my art about:
Lightning strikes, it breaks your bones and it breaks your heart. No matter who your gods are it’s your responsibility to give them the power they hold. My head has been cut off my shoulders! With every work of art I desperately try to sew it back onto my stolen body. To explore the spiritual is to explore the self. My work tries to find a way to make a dialogue with my inner gods and demons. It hopes to find to seek an audience with people who too feel like they have been cut away from the human world. My artwork is a constant battle between the call to the void and a consuming god complex. These themes can been explored though my experimental film, dance, and writing along with my visual mediums. In my illustrative and poetic works, works both through literal imagery and figurative narrative, I show trauma though aesthetic mutilation. I show holy beings beyond human who act as guides through the void with each demonic figure. I show the fibers of god by bastardizing the motives of Catholic art. My bodies are never gendered, never male nor female, simply put that gender is human, unholy, and falsely made to keep people in line. I bring forth how magic ties into the discovery of self and self-elevation and use many motifs indicative of my pagan religious beliefs. I try to find how fae and mortal can be one in a spiritual connection. |
