Micaela Pirizio-Biroli

Artist Statement

I believe there is a universe gone wild somewhere inside of me. It is an unruly place, a messy container of heightened emotions, inhabited by spirits of amorphous bodies with holy agendas in search of the truth. Sometimes, these spirits are joyous, and grace my bones with song and dance; sometimes they feel pain, and fill my blood with anger and fear, with jealousy and sorrow. I’ve named the home they’ve made inside my body the Red World, for while the color red indicates the hellish saturation of this universe, it also is the color of my heart – and that is where these spirits must live, bathed in both my most violent hate and my deepest love. The Red World is my home too.

I make art in order to commemorate this special place; I dream of an impossibly perfect marriage between the Red World and whatever makes up reality, so that the spirits dancing madly within me can riot and break free. Making artwork invites light into this interior place, manifesting a portal through which the beauty and pain on either side can meet. Over time, this has evolved into my interdisciplinary artistic practice, and as I draw from a growing number of mediums, I find ways to make creative gestures evermore honest to the Red World within. Through my work in performance, sculpture, installation, film, print, and paint, I strive to channel this tiny universe into the materials, sensations, and sites that belong to the world as we know it. Sometimes this means depicting the absurd, as a way to signify the unknowing relationship between disparate realities. For how am I to locate meaning in something as nonsensical as a pumpkin-headed ancestor, or a joyous widow forgetting to mourn, until I activate these impossible images in the flesh? At other times, I rely on recurring characters and visual motifs in my work, as a way to represent a significant force rampant inside of me. When I focus on a singular character over time, it is only natural that this figure and the narratives surrounding it will evolve, reflecting the lifetime of these archetypes as touchstones, teachers, and friends. Moving forward into the unknowing future of my creative practice, I hold these ideas close to my heart and realize them into living, breathing gestures, documenting the story of how the Red World greets the earth.