| Elegant contours of a lady’s face surrounded by vibrant petals spawned an upbeat atmosphere that encircled Broadway Gallery in New York City in April. Such was the work of Italian artist Stefania Carrozzini. The bold colors in Carrozzini’s collage piece created a strong contrast with the rest of the works presented in The Places of Inspiration, a group show curated by Carrozzini. A plethora of photography, installation, painting, and video, the exhibition gathered artists such as Ezio Balliano, Rosaspina Buscarino Canosburi, Giovanna Gammarota, Massimo Lomasto, Ambra Morosi, Antonietta Procopio, Enza Santoro, Susanne Weber, and Maria Chiara Zarabini. | 
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Catherine Y. Hsieh
Elegant contours of a lady’s face surrounded by vibrant petals spawned an upbeat atmosphere that encircled Broadway Gallery in New York City in April. Such was the work of Italian artist Stefania Carrozzini. The bold colors in Carrozzini’s collage piece created a strong contrast with the rest of the works presented in The Places of Inspiration, a group show curated by Carrozzini. A plethora of photography, installation, painting, and video, the exhibition gathered artists such as Ezio Balliano, Rosaspina Buscarino Canosburi, Giovanna Gammarota, Massimo Lomasto, Ambra Morosi, Antonietta Procopio, Enza Santoro, Susanne Weber, and Maria Chiara Zarabini.
Gammarota’s black-and-white photography piece consists of four frames. Each represents an angle from which the artist observes the world. Gammarota’s photographs exude solitude—a park enveloped in deep mist and tree shades with empty benches, and a shallow pond. Morosi’s nine photographs are both color and black-and-white. While the subject appears to be about people and their interrelationship, Morosi’s images are filled with a sense of seclusion. The blurred images of a man kissing a mannequin’s head, a woman lying in bed half naked, and a person sitting alone in a living room tell stories that unfold and freeze in time.
Canosburi’s wooden piece with various engravings investigates the relationship among space, lines, and composition. Zarabini’s sculptural installation, which is made of gold and silver mesh wire, makes a melodious reference to a poem by Emily Dickinson, “To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee, one clover and a bee and revery. The revery alone will do, if bees are few.” The daring blue in Procopio’s paintings dominates viewers’ senses at first glance with a cool note settling in their minds. Lomasto’s paintings transform natural landscapes into something bordering abstract and figurative, capturing the changing dynamics between the sea and the sky. Santoro’s photographs of toilets give off a sense of cold detachment, which renders them sacred, as if they became shrines. The clouds and seagulls against an azure sky in Balliano’s paintings take viewers on a journey in search of transient beauty.
The only video installation in the show came from Weber. The quirky footage catches Weber enacting a variety of movements, sometimes dancing, sometimes lying in white sheets, sometimes stretching her limbs in front of a little house, sometimes wearing a peculiar hat with her face devoid of expressions. Weber’s documentation of female figures represents her womanly gaze into this world—soft, gentle, yet eccentric. Her cloth pieces in palettes of red, gray, and beige portraying young girls in their fragile state serve as a looking glass on which her thoughts and emotions reflect. Weber’s works as well as those of her fellow artists in The Places of Inspiration encapsulated ephemeral moments that are so precious yet easily forgotten.
