Moskowitz Bayse is pleased to present Second Nature, an exhibition of new relief sculpture by Los Angeles-based artist Anthony Miserendino. Second Nature is the artist’s fifth solo exhibition with the gallery, and will be on view January 6 - February 10, 2024.
Second Nature presents sculpture that exemplifies how memory exists as a composite of first-person perspective aged by time, distance, and hindsight. Miserendino suspends subjects from their bustling environments–a market stall void of patron and street, a bartender in mid motion, a hat idly resting between uses. These abstracted vignettes resituate the stage of an inner eye’s monologue giving form, depth, and consideration to the small moments that hover between informative and influential.
Handmade, one of four large scale relief sculptures, pays respect to tradition, both hereditary and technical, while imploring the argument that to honor doesn’t necessitate stagnation. A fictitious one-to-one market stand is stocked for a day of selling freshly made pasta. Tortellini, farfalle, and orecchiette, shapes all made widely recognizable by manufactured boxed supermarket brands are nestled alongside penne’s handmade predecessor, garganelli, and individually stamped corzetti. Miserendino’s nonna, the family’s matriarch, makes a cameo as the business’s founder through the traditional portrait. Rather than employ the manufactured brands, Miserendino meticulously handcrafted each morsel of edible pasta, along with their respective tools, performing the tradition that is pervasive to Italian culture, but no longer a household trade.
On an equally ambitious scale, Flower Bed is a meditation on what the artist refers to as “the weight of delicate things in aggregate.” A pickup truck loaded to its capacity with freshly cut marigolds for a flower market drapes and folds under its implied and actual heft. As with Handmade the final work is a result of his unique method of casting relief sculptures in acrylic pigmented with clay slip. The product is a sculptural mask that hangs akin to a tapestry–structural rigidity dissipates as gravity and weight take increasing control. The marigold, a transhistorical marker of intergenerational connectivity, community, celebration, and renewal for an array of cultural and religious practices, en masse, folds past, present, and future into one.
Distilled further from their context, Pomegranate and Agave are particularly crisp snapshots of the nonlinear capacity of time as experienced by memory. A pomegranate cut open, an act that drastically decreases its life span, is cast in bronze and preserved in perpetuity. An agave plant sprawls freely in all directions, bearing scars that map its growth, softened by time, bound to be repeated until impeded by an outside force. Self-contained, but ubiquitously experienced, memory as content is distilled into a physical form.
Retaining the quiet candor one has come to anticipate from Miserendino, Second Nature marks a shift in the artist’s practice towards favoring autonomous works. Variations on a theme rather than call and response, his delicate sensibility of capturing the precise moment where plasticity of memory comes to rest is on full display.
Text by Jill Marriage