Jospeph Sabatino: FOUL PLAY

May 29 – July 26, 2014
Opening Reception: Thursday, May 29, 6-8pm

This event is free and open to the public.


It’s raw. It’s filth. It’s foul. Soft ground lies beneath your feet while vertical silk pods hover over you. Cold white walls attract sooty charcoal drawings as menacing elements corner you.

Shredded rubber mulch smothers the floor and compresses into your soles. Your perspective is altered through multiple dimensions, blurring the line between fantasy and reality. Soot-like charcoal and graphite works blemish perfectly white walls. Industrial velvet cement is encased in sheaths of raw intestine using a meat grinder that both packs and penetrates sheer skin. Cement-filled, cocoon-like casings hang above from scattered, black silk strands, nearly assaulting you in the face. Part structural form, part drawing, and part architectural anomaly piercing space, FOUL PLAY is sure to confront and provoke.

FOUL PLAY combines crude industrial materials with elements of nature. This new body of work is the third overlapping themed installation created within the last two and a half years. In his current exhibition, the artist continues to explore the life cycle of the silkworm, it’s attraction to the mulberry tree and how its phase of life and death forms a natural continuum. Even with the caterpillar’s brief lifespan, the larva feeds and quickly grows. It ultimately spins silk threads around its protective shell, later becoming unwound by an individual, then eventually woven into a luscious silk fabric.