Artist Biography:
Andrea Zampitella attended the Massachusetts College of Art where she earned a MFA in Interdisciplinary Studies, a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Art Education and Studio for Interrelated Media (SIM) Zampitella has exhibited in galleries and public spaces around Boston including the
Decordova Museum and Sculpture Park, The Rose Kennedy Greenway Conservancy, The Boston Children’s Museum, Axiom Gallery, Mobius Gallery and the Griffin Museum of Photography. Currently, she is a Library/Media Specialist at Winchester High School. She was included in UVA’s Earned: Women in Business and Labor exhibition at Boston City Hall’s Scollay Square Gallery in 2017.
Her personal artist website is http://www.andreazampitella.com
Artist Statement:
The tension between attraction and repulsion, constraint and liberation, defeat and triumph motivates my work. I navigate through material remnants, destroying, and rebuilding in order to create new contexts which are reflective of my current reality as a woman and artist in a fast paced, over-saturated world. I explored the confined body in ways that were both constraining and
liberating. I confined myself to reveal my own limitations, and subsequent humanity. Happy Homemaker explores the perception of women in American society. Our attire, and visual aesthetic nods back to the 1950s, when women felt the pressure to marry and live a life bound to the home to become servants to their husbands. The dominant theme promoted in the media was that women should aspire to a domestic life and not to advance their own careers. The slogan the “happy homemaker” was idealized in the media, and societal pressures kept women at home to provide for the family. In this piece we explore our notion of success and the absurdity of our ideals. The piece allows us to reflect upon how much has change since the 1950s, and how much baggage we still hold. Within and Without Bounds explores the duality of existence. The expansiveness of the ocean juxtaposed against the sinking weights attached to a body, conjuring up references to the suicide of Virgina Woolfe, the tantalizing possibility of self harm. I often find myself asking how much weight is being held based on our past, our inherited values and our traditions and not on our own beliefs? What do we loose if we let go of that weight? What do we gain? The figure draws her journey through the edge of the shore only for it to be continuously washed away by the tide. My research extends to the Victorian era, when women belonged to the domestic sphere, when the ideal silhouette at the time demanded a narrow waist, accomplished by a constricting corset that would lead to severe medical problems. While we have progressed since the Victorian era, women still carry the burden of these expectations. Within and Without Bounds speaks to expectation, imperfection, perseverance, what we willingly do to ourselves as artists, as women, and as a society.Fine China, explores the composition of improbable materials in ways that contradict their function. The piece pushes our notion about the connotation of certain materials, in this case ,porcelain, and how we associate it with fragility and weakness. In Fine China, I pull together the industrial and domestic as well as the relationship of strong and delicate. I challenge the viewer to question the dichotomy of feminine and masculine, strong and weak, possible and impossible. This “balancing act” forces us to reexamine our relationships with objects and ideas physically and metaphorically.
I aim for a visual poetry, a universal story.