2024 recipient of the Gottlieb Foundation Individual Artist Support Grant
2024 recipient of a New Jersey Individual Artist Grant
BIO
Val Sivilli is a painter often using printmaking as a vehicle for expanding the image potential of a painting or a narrative series. A Brooklyn transplant, Val lives Art, teaches Art and exhibits Art. She lives in the Delaware Valley and holds an MFA from Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University and a BFA from SUNY Alfred. She has been an Adjunct Professor of Art in various colleges. Val Sivilli was the director of the original Steamroller Gallery in Frenchtown New Jersey and a current member of the Steamroller Group, an artist collective. Val is also a founding member of “THAT, The Hunterdon Art Tour”, a county wide tour of Hunterdon County’s Artist Studios. Val is also the artist behind Civilian Art, a local graphic design and T-Shirt company. Born in Brooklyn, raised on Long Island, Val tends not to stray too far from the banks of the Delaware River on the west coast of New Jersey where you might find her playing the accordion somewhere.
ARTIST STATEMENT
“I make paintings depicting tools, toys, feral beasts, and strong opinions with a nod toward expressive abstraction. Everyday objects become larger truths that serve as harbingers of an interior world beckoning provocative questions of the exterior world. By stitching the past into the present through the familiar, collective meaning transcends quotidian.
Strong dynamics are possible when the activity of painting combines with the graphic quality of printmaking. I often use stencils and direct printing to facilitate repetition. It is in that repetition that familiar objects often become symbolic versions of themselves, deepening their resonance. Repetition invokes the past, teasing out memory and calls on history to accentuate subtle nuances that connect the political present through the personal past.
Marrying the graphic quality of printing with the visceral characteristics of paint assists me in maximizing the vast possibilities inherent in the formal qualities of color and composition. Combining printmaking and painting helps me to uncover elusive hidden narratives in each individual project. When paint, palette, composition, and narrative find their role, the true essence of the work emerges.”
VAL SIVILLI
ABOUT DIRECT PRINTING
“Soon after the twin towers fell in 2001, I visited a small catholic chapel up on a hill in Lodi, NJ to get a good view of those 88 beams of light shining up from the ruins of the towers. The chapel was jammed with life sized replicas of the Shroud of Turin as well as a large selection of relics from saints.
There was so much energy stored there. Memory is stored in revered places as well as in objects, bodies and bones. That visit had me thinking about a ‘relic’ as life energy saved of a revered person. I began to explore this rarely used printmaking process - direct printing. I eventually printed bones, deer carcasses, dead birds, tools, the human body, mostly mine but also animals and other people. I documented myself speaking sign language.
Printing directly from 3D versions on the object, recalls the physical world, transfers the presence of that object through the media chosen by the artist, delivered by the actions of the body and decisions of the mind of the artist, through the pressure created by the artist’s hands, and. finally, into the fabric.
VAL SIVILLI