PNCA Personal Statement Essay

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Damon Campagna | Personal Statement | PNCA My road to graduate study is circuitous. I graduated high school in 1990 and left RISD’s illustration department in the first year for financial reasons. Working part-time toward a BFA at Rhode Island College through the late ‘90s, I was offered a gallery job in New York City, which led to a career curating and running various non-profit organizations. However, I never gave up my goal of finishing my BFA, and in 2014 I returned to RIC. In 2016, I graduated magna cum laude and was awarded the school’s Departmental Award for Studio Art. I was born in a pre-Star Wars ‘70s, and the space program, with its marvelous technological complexity, was exciting and real. I had nightmares of Skylab crashing into our house! This mechanical imagery is a sentimental base for my current work, but natural textures and dynamic, living systems are just as inspirational. Although my pieces may begin with mechanical-looking material, they grow organically. Sometimes the art is about the piercing, unfiltered overflow of information and energy, other times it’s more about how those components can be tamed to construct something darkly sublime, or delicate and fragile. I collage and paint, de-collage and sand; the archaeology and erasure of history within a piece are matters I investigate as I go …show more content…

Shapes are cut individually and affixed to the canvas one at a time, each mark informing the next. It’s possible to make the process more amenable to reproducible techniques like etching or digital printing (or have no physical form at all), but I insist on clinging to the conventions of painting, such as the brush and stretched canvas. When I finish a painting, there will be no copy. It is a physical and irreplaceable creation, complete unto

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