LUCIA GALLIPOLI
BY ASHLESHA SATHE
LUCIA GALLIPOLI (b. 1998, Greenwich, CT) makes confessional textile art by contrasting gentle materials with unwieldy feelings. In her studio, nearly every surface you see is soft and delicate. Pastels cover the interior, carpet and wallpaper make you feel at home, and text in the work reads like a diary. ASHLESHA SATHE is a multimedia artist who makes intimate objects and images that call to be loved by anyone who sees them. The two had the pleasure of being studio neighbors this year, and sat down together to have a chat about Lucia's inspirations, audience, and experiences that feed her wide-ranging practice.
Ashlesha Sathe: You are so dedicated to the materials you use. Can you speak to your thrifting + vintage shopping practice?
Lucia Gallipoli: I am pretty dedicated to sourcing my materials mostly slowly and secondhand, honestly just because it brings me joy to always look for potential in objects that have been discarded by other people! Occasionally, if I have a particular material in mind and I can't find it anywhere I will source it new - but I try to thrift regularly and with an open mind and filter my eBay searches by "used". I like the idea that it's more environmentally friendly to use second hand materials, of course, but even more so I just like slowly collecting materials in advance with no project in mind because they feel special to me. It's so exciting when I get an idea for a project that I can immediately start to whip up because a year ago I randomly encountered and bought whatever specific fabric at an estate sale!
AS: In my eyes, your material choice and technique is often so decidedly feminine. How does femininity play into your work?
LG: Thank you for noticing that, oh my God! I feel like, sometimes my work is sort of an active celebration of femininity and it definitely feels like it's an active thought while I'm making my work. It's very intentional. And then sometimes I feel like, just because I celebrate girlhood, it just kind of happens one way or another. Anyway, I do hope that people of all genders can connect with my work. I feel like I get why some people might not connect with it, particularly like cis men. I hope that it resonates with them as well, but some of it, it's not, like, for them. But I really do hope that people can connect with my work regardless of their gender.
AS: Love that! I also find that your personal style tends to reflect your artistic sensibilities/material choice. How do these things relate for you- or do you just find yourself gravitating towards similar things?
LG: I feel generally aesthetically drawn to things that are sweet and girly and I find that it manifests in my work no matter what. Even when I think I've totally dialed it back, I always get the feedback that it's still present. That being said, I also like to incorporate the cutesy aesthetics I'm drawn to intentionally as a way to add tension to some of the bittersweet messaging in my work.
AS: Your audience online is pretty wide - do the reactions you see there ever play into your process or inspire new work? Are there any that have stuck with you?
LG: I'm so glad you asked. I feel like I like to make jokes about the hate comments that I get partially just because they seem so ridiculous. I see things that I don't like all the time and I'm not leaving hate comments on them basically ever. But yeah, and I just feel like ... "oh my God, this person's so unwell!" Even if part of what they're saying is a little bit true. I just wouldn't say that under someone's video. Especially since it won't be an anonymous person saying it. It'll be like a guy with a gun in his profile picture. I got called demonic or satanic. That's kind of a common theme now that I'm making work that's sort of agnostic at best, and questioning the relationship that I don't have with God. At the same time, I'm not being like, "religion is inherently evil". I'm just talking about the way that it's weaponized. Anyway, that was such a tangent. In terms of comments that have stuck with me I feel really lucky that I overwhelmingly receive nice comments and feedback, like truly, multiple times a day. Sometimes, I'll get comments that almost make me cry because they're so nice. I feel very lucky. Of course, the rare hate comments that I get stick with me, just because they are honestly, so rare. And it only happens if I have like a viral post and then even then I'm like, "okay, well this just wasn't for that person". My memory is really bad, but I made a piece last year called I Used to Pray and the full piece, when read with the title, is I Used to Pray, but God wouldn't be 5'8". That probably is the video I received the most hate comments on. Just because I feel like a lot of people misinterpreted it as me, like, dunking on people who are 5'8". If someone interprets it that way, I guess they're allowed to do that. I can't control that. When I made the piece, it was more that I had been making art about worshiping people who in hindsight I realized were very human. Like, I'm 5'8", and I was just thinking - I don't think God would resemble a human at all, and I feel like 5'8" is such a normal height. But also, I don't think God would be 6'2". I don't think God would be 5'4". Like I just don't think God would be nose to nose with any human. I had a lot of people commenting "Oh my God, that's really changed my thinking and relieved me of worshiping this random person", in so many words. And honestly for me it was sort of a revelation, which sounds very silly to be like, "God wouldn't be 5'8". [explosion noise]" But it really changed my way of thinking, and I've gotten a lot of comments that it's helped people in one way or another. And those comments really stuck with me. And also I'm like, "Oh my God that's crazy that my work can resonate with anyone!" I have so much impostor syndrome, but I feel very lucky. Also, when you're an artist and you're sharing your work on line, you're kind of putting yourself in the position to receive feedback, and on one hand, when I get a hate comment I'm like, "Okay, well, I wouldn't leave that on someone's video," but at the same time, it is a public forum. So it's to be expected. People aren't always well behaved.
AS: Okay, let's talk God - your thesis project centers around the concept of navel-gazing and becoming one's own deity. How did you come to this parallel?
LG: I'm making a lot of art about people who I had been in relationships with before. And I started thinking about the idea that I was like, worshiping these people in some way, or worshiping the amalgamation of all the good things in all of them. I was like, "why am I doing that?" And then someone in our program asked me if I was "theological". And that made me really mad, because the way they said it, it seemed like they were testing whether I knew what that word meant. But also, because I was thinking about my relationship with religion and I was thinking "no, I don't believe in God in your traditional sense, in relationship to organized religion, but I absolutely will worship literally anyone who I have unrequited feelings for, for sure". So I was thinking about that and the first piece that I made about that was called I used to pray, 'cause it was sort of me coming to the realization that God wouldn't resemble a human and certainly wouldn't be someone who ... yeah, was one of the people who I was kind of worshiping and deifying at the time. And when they asked me if I was theological, I was walking on the street kind of angrily after that. And I was like, "I don't need God to tell me what's good." Then I had the thought, "my lore is like the Bible to me." i.e., all of the zany stories that I've collected throughout my life. That kind of teaches and kind of gives me a moral compass. Basically just using your personal experience as a way to just sort of gauge what feels good and bad. Some things are obvious. Like, don't kill people, for sure. [laughs] Don't be mean. Again, my work isn't really responding to organized religion, as much as it's responding to how it's weaponized, and what I've learned through osmosis about Christianity in America. The project came to me because I was examining my relationship with religion and my relationship with having deified people who were just totally normal, who for whatever reason made me feel crazy and who I looked up to in one way or another. .. Because it felt like such a power imbalance, which I suppose, is sort of a relationship between a human and God.
AS: You say your personal lore is your religion- how do you worship? Do you consider your practice a form of worship and devotion?
LG: I would definitely consider my art practice to be a form of devotion. Also, by the way, love that question! I generally just consider documenting my experiences and cataloguing them to be a form of worship and sort of, I guess, commemorating them. Like the stories and things that have happened to me; for a while I wasn't thinking of it this way, but in hindsight I do feel it was this way. Like, from 2017 through 2019, my finsta— for those who don't know, a fake Instagram account— was private and only a select number of my friends could see. But I would post, sometimes upwards of three times a day, about anything that was happening in my life that I would not want to share on my main Instagram account. I wasn't really posting on Instagram otherwise. It was sort of a diary that was private and only visible to some of my friends. I would post pictures: I would be on a date, I would be at a person's apartment. I would go to their bathroom. I would take a selfie in their bathroom. And then just be like, "this is what I'm thinking, this guy's so weird," or "oh my God, I like this guy. What do I do?" Or it would be that someone's not replying to me or "I'm getting in an argument with my parents," just anything happening from age 19 to 21. And I feel like that's a form of worship, of respecting my own life as a way to guide me. By the way, I hope that this is clear, I don't think that my life in particular is worth worshiping. I think anyone's life, if they so choose, should be something that they can sort of use as a way to reflect. I think that anyone's life is worth worshiping! Not to be corny, but it sort of is a miracle that any of us are here. Genuinely. And, yeah, I feel like everyone should feel kind of special— not to be so millennial participation award about it. It sort of is a little bit rage bait-y cause it's like, "oh my God, you're so self-centered," and I feel like posting this kind of art on social media that's "me me me!", sort of also feeds into like the narcissistic (colloquially used, of course) aspect of it. And honestly, if people get annoyed by that? Good. If you're so annoyed that someone is celebrating their life you need to think about that. I don't know. I feel like the people that my work pisses off... it's people who ... dare I say, it feels misogynistic. It's the type of people who say, "well, influencers are bad," but are doing functionally the same thing in a marketing job and think, "well, that's fine."
AS: Totally. I feel like we've sort of danced around this subject, but I was wondering if you could specifically speak to your relationship with the Internet. Especially since your work references the Internet quite often, I was wondering if you could tell us about how the internet informs your work.
LG: Growing up on line has shaped so much of me and in particular, my art practice. I have primarily learned about art through the internet and most of my favorite artists I found literally by scrolling Tumblr or Instagram in my bed. Most of my art friends before going to SVA were longtime internet mutuals of mine who are still some of my favorite artists. I feel like social media makes art networking easier in many ways? I would say that it's influenced my art practice in the sense that it has affected every aspect of my life, honestly. My aesthetic interests, whose work I am up to date on ... I also, admittedly, sometimes am motivated to finish work because I know I can post it? I try not to let it impact what I actually make, but if I'm putting off finishing work, I'm basically always motivated to finish things by remembering the little community I've found online. Especially on Instagram. Honestly— and maybe this is sad— but the biggest way my work has been impacted by social media is through how my confidence in my work has been infinitely increased by people who've found me online. I feel like my work is pretty niche in its messaging and frilly aesthetic and it's easier to build a community around hyper specific interests online than it is in person. It's easier to target the algorithm with niche community hashtags than it is to control who comes into a physical gallery space, I think. Because of that, I have been able to show my work to people who connect with it more on line, and their overwhelmingly generous feedback has made me feel a lot more sure of myself!
