Rebecca DiDomenico
Rebecca DiDomenico was born in Greenbrae, California. She attended school at Claremont College, Tribhuvan University in Nepal, and graduated from the University of Colorado with a BA in English Literature. In DiDomenico’s world, there is no separation between art and life, studio and home. Her work is concerned with the collision and interpenetration of various forms of nature, mythology, art history, and metaphysics. With her innate, relentless curiosity, DiDomenico casts the net of her imagination wide. “I am interested in unexpected relationships, the way a spider web mimics a wheel, the commonality between Dr. Seuss and the Dalai Lama, the resemblance between patterns in the constellations of the stars and the minute particles inside the human body.”
A selected list of her exhibitions, collections and publications includes Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver; Denver International Airport; San Francisco Craft & Folk Art Museum; Denver Art Museum; Artspace; Art Papers; Artweek; Marin Independent Journal; The Washington Post; Art in America; and The New York Times.
Rebecca DiDomenico has several works in two sites in The Space(s) Between. In Denver’s Vicki Myhren Gallery, the artist has installed Purling Water, 2021, paper, thread, chiffon, site-specific installation. The artist’s project statement for this work, seen at left in detail from a previous iteration, is below.
“I live at the edge of the Colorado mountains and walk every day from the lower elevation of my garden to the mountains above me, traversing the contours of the land. I notice my body and soul in relative positions and elevations. I find myself grounded on the earth, soaring in the sky or unexpectedly solid in the sky and ephemeral on the ground. Both worlds connect through my walking and my work. I sew contours on fabric, joining threads, stitch by stitch into a succession of short lines as a complete landscape emerges, an island taken out of context, floating on the wall and suspended in space.
Traditional topography is meant to translate the multidimensional features of the earth’s surface, yet once reduced into a two-dimensional format, it fails to capture the all-encompassing emotional immensity of the landscape. Inviting viewers beyond the traditional version of a limited topographical world into a deeper sensual reality, the world of physical matter meets up with the diaphanous, other-worldly land in a continual state of breath and influx. The topographical lines exist in the form of a whirl, emanating from a central axis; a prescient test or trial of changing proportions.
These experiments echo the artistic process, the shape-shifting of the internal into the external. The fragile islands cling tenaciously to the whirling landscape. The breakneck pace of the world around us is seductive, no doubt. However, nature is transformative in its very existence and therefore at home in chaos.
Here, “the still point of the turning world”, where the whirling chaos and a peaceful state of suspended animation, exist simultaneously.
We are all here as co-creators, moving in a realm beyond the dual nature of empty and populated, simple and complex, dark and light, conscious and unconscious in order to learn to embrace the full-bodied present moment.
I am interested in the fundamental mystery, in drawing connections between disparate objects, and elucidating relationships between similar materials. For instance, how can a thread be used to represent purling water? Or what is the relationship between a canopy of islands floating overhead to islands rising up from the depth of the ocean floor? Or how is the smallest nuclear particle similar to a far-off galaxy? I think about the fleeting, ephemeral nature of a butterfly and the seeming solidity of a chunk of mica as if it is an equation. What can you add or subtract to come up with a new possibility? I like the idea of illuminating the world around us as if I have a flashlight sending out a beam onto one pinpoint. And hopefully, that beam will radiate out, shape-shift again and again, and join with another source of light. All searching for illumination, for the irresistible entanglement of every creative endeavor, seems to me to be a longing for a deeper, mystical union.“
