Jenna Basso Pietrobon
Bio: Born in Toronto, Jenna Basso Pietrobon was raised in a Roman Catholic Italian family. Both of her grandfathers were artisans, one of whom worked with clay to manufacture lamps, and the other as a stonemason. She was exposed to industrial materials at an early age, and growing up as a dancer, she often found herself recreating performances with her siblings in their father’s lighting factory. In 2008, after receiving her undergraduate degree at the University of Western Ontario, she moved to New York. While immersed in the architectural world for her family business, she maintained an active, independent studio practice.
Thesis Exhibition
Artist Statement: Researching and referencing movements as sociopolitically and formally diverse as the reductive essentialism of Minimalism and even Fascist architecture, and the adroit utilizing and reinvention of discarded, everyday materials of Arte Povera.
A Roofless Home
A sense of what we may refer to when we are a child as 'our first universe,’ the home, lies at the premise of this body of work, both as a physical and a psychological. As Gaston Bachelard elucidates, “Thanks to the house, a great many of our memories are housed, and our memories have refuges...All our lives we come back to them in our daydreams... I should like to give the name of topoanalysis to [an] auxiliary of psychoanalysis. Topoanalysis, then would be the systematic psychological study of the sites of our intimate lives.” Through returning to these physical and psychological refuges, unshrouding them through the removal of their sheltering canopy, I’m invested in the simple osmosis of entwining past memory with present place.
L to R: Untitled: From the collection ‘White Powder, White Stone,’ (108″ × 30″ × 24″, Metal and aircraft cables, 2016); Untitled: From the collection ‘Blood Feather,’ (312" × 78", Oil, fabric, and copper wire on canvas, 2016)