Amalia Pica’s Accumulations and Overlaps at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery is another potent demonstration of artistic creativity being very much a product of the environment as much as the artist herself. Ms. Pica, as is the rest of world civilization, is being contained by an invisible pestilence which is slowly, almost tauntingly, remaining airborne and infectious on Planet Earth. Her environmental conditions moved her to contemplating her children’s playthings, but with the upmost irony, her cast bronze artwork triumphs as a meditation upon the bloviated rigmarole of the civilized state apparatus and its ineffectiveness at supporting human life, as judged by the hundreds of thousands of deaths that have been tragically caused by SARs-CoV-2.

It is here where her artistry flourishes with the keen idea of presenting a collection of paperweights, all in cast bronze and in dimensions no larger than 24 inches, to reflect the new homeward bound working conditions of the digital world. Whereas before office space placed the tattered eroding residues of the human means to higher ends (or paperwork), now, for so much of human work life, our residency and humble abodes have become a meeting place for industriousness, creating new environmental demands for maintaining one’s productivity in humanity. This is where we can find it happily coy for Ms. Pica to weigh in on the matter, helping us reflect upon the contrast between action which is temporary to that which its ends serve: the timeless. Beauty. Love. Etcetera.

To have our sanctuaries buttressed with documents which need scanning, faxing, mailing, etc. can now be met with a happy counter-balance with aesthetic reminders of the ultimate path to pave in one’s life. Paperweight #6  is a nice demonstration of this playfulness, especially with the color of the lemon acting as an iridescent reminder of an outside natural world which we are obligated to participate in to make ourselves whole. We have further abstracted designs which act to provide ourselves with the consideration of the inconceivable admixture of, say, a spoon in Paperweight #10 or Paperweight #11 with a pile of paperwork that needs to be removed from our sights, lest it distract us with the anxieties of our place in time.

‘Paperweight #10’. Cast bronze. 3.75×7.75×2 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York/Los Angeles

‘Paperweight #11’. Cast bronze. 5.25x10x4 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York/Los Angeles

It would be wonderful for the artist to move toward providing more illuminous color, especially of natural fruit, to these details which can help us contemplate a better rendition of the world that ought to be: one of splendorous abundance of the fruits of one’s toil.