In The Backspace

Le Stanze

Iole Alessandrini

December 03 – January 02, 2015
Reception / Thursday, December 03, 6–8pm

Le Stanze is Italian for Rooms. Resulting from a residency in Venice at the Scuola Internazionale di Grafica this Summer, these polychromatic prints embody the essence of traditional print making. Lines, shapes and colors using Chine Colle technique redefine the space of a room originally lit by planes of green laser light.

Alessandrini’s Le Stanze prints are an original exploration on subtractive colors. Using a photo taken by Ed Mannery of Untitled – a laser installation that Ed and Iole designed and built at Jack Straw in 2004 – she etched a minimalistic rendering of the room lit and crisscrossed by ten laser planes onto copper plates. In absence of depth and shadows the Le Stanze prints provide a departure from reality to become utter abstraction.

Iole Alessandrini is a native of Italy. She studied art and architecture at the University La Sapienza in Rome. Then in ’94, at the University of Washington she obtained her second Masters in Architecture with emphasis on Light and Industrial Design. Much of her work is environmental in scale. Her installations activate spaces particularly at nighttime, the lights are their bright symbols that entice people’ sense of wonder and awareness.

This project received a 2014 GAP grant from Artist Trust.