Nelson DaCosta: Marks of Memories
Alice Denison: Memento Flori

January 8 — 30 at Gallery NAGA

2010 at Gallery NAGA begins with two artists who use painting as symbolic language.  Nelson DaCosta continues his exploration of a personal history that has taken him from a childhood in wartime Angola through his training as a painter in Cuba and graduate studies at  Tufts and the Museum School to his present painting studio in Dorchester.  Alice Denison uses a floral motif to examine the space between interior décor and interior lives.

Nelson DaCosta: Marks of Memories and Alice Denison: Memento Flori both run from January 8 through 30.  A reception for the artists and the public will be held at the gallery on Friday, January 8 from 6 to 8 pm.

To draw out the personal meanings within their paintings, we asked each a few questions, starting with Nelson DaCosta.

Gallery NAGA:  How would you characterize your new work?

Nelson DaCosta:  I’ve been reflecting on the title of the show, Marks of Memories.  It relates to when I was younger, a little boy, my grandmother was telling me stories about the formation of the world and how we became humans.

Q:  What did she tell you?

A:  It was very much a scientific notion. She said that we have been water before, and then some kind of microscopic species, and then that species gave birth to other species, and then evolution through other animals, and then another species developed as human.  My work is not an exact reflection of these ideas, it’s more me reflecting about formation and then destruction, in the sense of social conflicts like wars.

Q:  So both the idea of creation as well as the idea of destruction are in the work for you..

A:  Exactly.

Q:  And both are going on all the time.

A:  Good point.  For me, it’s very much about the contradiction.  Positive space and negative space, a dialogue.  Something’s emerging, and something dies.  I don’t have a particular finished idea.  This is more how I balance life and death.

Alice Denison took at studio degree from Mount Holyoke College in 1980 and painted throughout years of work as a grant writer for non-profit organizations.  She began exhibiting in 2000 and in 2007 completed her MFA from the combined program of the Massachusetts College of Art and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.

Gallery NAGA:  Your work depicts flowers and seems to be about flowers as images, but the flowers don’t seem to be the true subject.  They seem to be stand-ins in some sense.

Alice Denison:  Yes.  I think they very much are stand-ins.  It’s funny.  Flowers are clichés, but they’re also profound.  I really am much more inspired by flowers from fabric, very much the image of flowers.  I grew up with a grandmother who did needlepoint and an aunt who did crewelwork.  Floral wallpaper and carpets were all around me.  I think the flowers are a way of trying to express something about loss and leaving and decay and the weird state that we’re in where we’re alive and conscious of being alive and of mortality.  They’re not about themselves.

Q:  In some works you deliberately remove some of the classic painterly devices for depicting flowers, making the images look more artificial, as if the illusion is breaking down.

A:  I would agree with that.  But they don’t have stems.  You know, I keep thinking, “Well, why don’t you just put stems on the damn flowers,” and I really don’t know why, except that, again, they’re not real, and stems would somehow make them a part of the actual world, rather than a part of this weird picture.

Q:  So much of interior décor is about bringing inside the house imagery that’s outside the house – leaves, trees.  Flowers are an emblem of that.

A:  I haven’t ever thought of it that way.  I usually think of flowers that are on patterns as reflecting a decorative impulse that’s very safe, they’re very happy, they’re cheerful.  They’re like Muzak in a way.

Q:  But they’re a little less happy and cheerful in your work.

A:  They’re much less happy and cheerful in my work.  There is something strange about living in a household with all of this comforting, decorative Muzak around it, high Muzak, I suppose, and living with all of the usual pains and problems within that cave. 

Q:  You’re talking more about the discrepancy between that kind of imagery and the actual nature of most people’s lives.

A:  Exactly.  We set ourselves up, if we can, with these happy, harmonious, and comforting spaces that can only offer so much.