Yuko Otomo and Angela Valeria

***The opening event is Friday, November 12th, 6-9 PM***

During the duration of the show, music performances & poetry readings will take place at the gallery. The schedule will be posted on the website.

Valeria’s images explore an inseparable link between the human race and nature and our reciprocal evolution shared with all the other life-forms that share this planet. Inspired by deities of ancient religions, myths and folklore, she combines human and animal features to let the spirits, often times hidden from our eyes, emerge. More than likely they are hung in unlikely spaces. Her installation of dyed clothing: “A Bird in Flightis an Omen” hung on a clothesline in Tribes backyard for five months with enough dye left on some of the cloth to allow the elements to have their own effect. Her films, often of repetitive acts become a meditation on the ephemeral.

Otomo’s words are set in motion around Valeria’s images, sometimes relating directly to the images shown and other times unrelated to them. These clips and lines selected from her collection of poetry and a new poem composed particularly for this exhibition titled “I am Vermillion” evoke the unexpected alchemical juxtapositions and interpretations between images and words

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Valeria has been making art since the early sixties. Studied at Hunter College with Motherwell, Baziotes and Ray Parker and in Florence and Bologna at the Academy of Fine Arts. She has exhibited extensively in Europe, especially Italy, New York City, Mexico, Japan and India. Her last solo show was in her father’s home town of Bari, Italy. She has taught art to a wide and varied audience, most recently at Parsons School of Art and Design.

With her double identity as a poet and a visual artist, Otomo has read her poetical work in various venues such as Poetry Project at St. Marks, PS 1, Queens Museum, NY Public Library, NYU, La Mama, Issue Project Room, Bowery Poetry Club and Tribes. She has shown her visual work in Tribes Gallery, Vision Festival and Court House Gallery at Anthology Film Archives. Her publications include: A Sunday Afternoon on the Isle of Museum (Propaganda Press), Small Poems(Ugly Duckling Presse, 2005), Pink (Sisyphus Press), A Voice that Crawls in the Sky (Creature Press) and others. She co-edited Tribes Magazine #12.