Barbara Ravizza: Conversation Pieces

…complicated, funny, poignant, multi-layered…. Ravizza’s potent conversations about important cultural issues between archetypal art historical figures, evocative images and provocative icons.  Blending art historical references with popular culture, Ravizza  creates modern day parables. These are purposeful and wry odes to big timeless topics such as beauty, death, evil, loss and much more. Ravizza generates these surprising , drama-filled mysterious artworks by coupling refined painted images with sometimes playful, sometimes painful text and objects.

-Amy Beck

 “What you don’t see is what you get,” Ravizza has written… pointing out that what we try to conceal about ourselves does not disappear but remains integral to our interactions with one another. Mining both her personal history and the history of western representation, Ravizza then injects her images with the flotsam of our consumer cultures.   Refusing to oversimplify the issues at stake, the artist invites viewers to participate in conversations that have personal, political and art-historical dimensions.

– David Spalding

I am interested in our lives in this time and place. I use collage and the bits and pieces of life contrasted with a central image to explore it. I carry on a graphic dialogue between an icon, or central image, and the bits and pieces… While I am working my head is very quiet inside and I hear bits of statements. The quieter I am during work the louder the conversation is.

-Barbara Ravizza