ARTIST STATEMENT

I grew up with the stories and images of Catholicism, absorbing both the beautiful and horrific, and emerging with a paradoxical equanimity. I bring this mysterious balance into my mixed media work, enabling me to comment on the conflicting conventions of nature, human society, especially everyday life, and the human soul. I revisit themes of mortality and its ever presence, loss, and memory particularly childhood memory.

My work includes representational painting, drawing, and collage materials sourced from printed matter, fabric, vintage handcrafted textiles, and found objects. A hand-wrought aesthetic, learned at a young age from my family of handcrafters, permeates my detailed colorful work. The layered compositions and contradictory images reveal a subtle humor and subversive underbelly, often imbuing the work with an enigmatic yet playful tone.

Lydia Viscardi

TIME TAKES TIME (2022 - present)

“We have outsmarted ourselves like greedy monkeys, and now we are full of dread.”

Peter Mathieson, The Snow Leopard

“I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things…

Wendell Berry, The Peace of Wild Things

Time Takes Time is a body of mixed media work about the passage of time experienced through observing the changing seasons and the tense relationship that exists between human and animal habitation. Pollution, overpopulation and unabated development for housing, industry and agriculture have led to a reduction of native species habitat. Add to this overhunting and overfishing, and wild animal populations have been drastically depleted globally.

The current climate crisis we are so late to finally face is caused by our human excess. The world we have created in our image disregards the connectivity of all earths’ creatures. The balance between humans and animals appears less off kilter living here in semi-rural suburban Connecticut with wild animals in proximity. While the shift may seem subtle, year after year, as time passes and wild places are developed, more and more species become a distant memory.

THE EARLY LIFE OF HENRY VISCARD, JR. (2024 - )

ARTIST-IN-RESIDENCE, Summer 2024 at LENOX HILL NEIGHBORHOOD HOUSE

My residency project is creating a visual narrative chronicling the early life of my father, Dr. Henry Viscardi, Jr. (1912-2004) a world-renowned champion of Disability Rights. My drawings are based on his 1952 autobiography, A Man's Stature. Born in NYC with severely deformed stumps for legs, his first memories are the charity hospital he called “home” where he lived for years while undergoing many surgeries. He triumphed over the hardships of his physical disability, tenement life and severe prejudice, finally receiving his prosthetic legs at age 27. In 1952, Henry gave up a burgeoning career in the business world to become the founder and president of Abilities, Inc. a company staffed largely by the disabled, spearheading the Disability Rights movement. Today, the Viscardi Center in Albertson, Long Island, NY is an internationally acclaimed educational, training and research center devoted to people with disabilities.

My narrative series will be approximately 25 panels in total. Thank you to Lenox Hill Neighborhood House for making this Residency possible. My experience over the summer, working on my project while leading art workshops with the clients of the Women’s Mental Health Shelter and the Older Adult Center, has been invaluable.

HERE AND HEREAFTER (2019-2021)

Depictions of heaven and hell were ubiquitous in my parochial school education, and subsequent Art History classes, visits to museums and churches reinforced the doctrines and didactic imagery that formed my impression of the afterlife. My own beliefs have evolved but the imagined euphoria of heaven and torments of hell remain indelibly lodged in my psyche. Here and Hereafter is part of the memento mori tradition dating back to Socrates, early Christianity, and the Netherland’s 17th century still-life vanitas paintings meant to remind us of our mortality. Although this body of work was begun before Covid, now more than ever, mortality has been pushed to the forefront of our lives.

In this ongoing series, the paintings are divided into three realms: heaven, earth, and hell. They include detailed realistic oil and acrylic paint, metallic paper mounted to canvas, collage, found hand-crafted textiles, and fabric. The textiles in my work are reminiscent of domesticity and security and counter the mystery of the afterlife. The resulting mashup of traditional painting, collage, altered scale and abstraction creates simultaneous tension and humor. The works on paper are mixed media and collage depicting heaven above earth.

SPACESHOTS (2019-2021)

In Spaceshots, a series of mixed media works on paper, I imagine views of heaven from the perspective of our comparatively puny Earth. These works are contemplations on the vast infinite universe, feelings of insignificance and the contradictory desire to possess material things while longing to transcend the endless wanting. I interweave drawing, paint and collage materials, some cut from glossy advertisements for expensive consumer goods. Some of these ads market their products as celestial and timeless. However, acquiring goods in search of happiness or status is ultimately folly as even the most priceless commodity does not bring everlasting joy or alter destiny.

The Spaceshots follow in the memento mori tradition, a reflection on mortality and the shortness and tenuousness of life. The Latin phrase means ‘remember you must die’. These works are both a friendly reminder of this and a wistful desire to rise above the reality of everyday existence.

TRIAL AND RUSE (2017-2019)

I am interested in the ways one copes with painful memories or ongoing adversity. In this volatile world, how do people endure the horrific catastrophes they encounter and manage to survive and even find joy in their lives? Memory can be slippery, changing over time to make the unbearable tolerable. What are the stories we withhold or alter for our own wellbeing or for the benefit of others?

In Trial and Ruse, I use mixed media on found medium size format photographs of car accidents that were discarded after they served as trial documentation. I also use mixed media on smaller prints of found car crash photographs that I first alter digitally. I was drawn to the grainy images with the same queasy fascination that an actual car accident elicits despite being repulsed at the violence that precipitated the event. I use the car crashes to embody tribulation, or any painful past or present event imbedded in the psyche. I alter the photos with ink, paint, drawing medium, collage, and carved lines to make the original image more obscure but never fully obliterated, much the way my own emotional wounds heal but the scars remain buried below the surface.

RECOLLECTIONS AND CHILDWORKS (2010-2016)

“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“When we are young we are a jungle of complications.”

Graham Greene, The Quiet American

A primary focus of my mixed media work is the complexity of memory, particularly the potency of earliest experiences and how these inform adult identity. Childhood is innocent and benign yet often fraught with fear and anxiety. The physiology of memory lies at the center of our identity, determining to varying degrees who we are and who we become.

In Recollections, I mine my childhood for potent experiences that I depict with both humor and unease. My mother died in the fall of 2015, evoking more memories. These were rekindled in discovering my childhood stuffed animals and drawings that my mother had packed away. In Childworks, I create images of my toys with mixed media and collage, using my old drawings to continue an ongoing investigation into memory, childhood and our human/animal nature.

BIG BLING

Children inherit their parents’ beliefs. At an early age, I was taught to appreciate handmade objects of all kinds, both refined antiques and cruder folk crafts from many cultures. My assemblage wall reliefs are informed by jewelry, both precious metal and gemstone Victorian era jewelry admired by my maternal elders, and cheap colorful pieces they disparagingly referred to as “costume jewelry.” I combine carved elements with fabric, wood, metal, and found objects to address the subjective perspective of what makes something desirable, beautiful, and valuable.

Jewelry is one of the oldest of archeological artifacts. It is made from an assortment of materials such as beads, shells, teeth, feathers, diamonds, silver, platinum, and gold. In most cultures, jewelry can be used as a means of self-expression, as a status symbol for its material properties, and appreciated for its patterns, rarity, meaningful symbols, or sentimentality. “Bling” is a term popularized by American rap musicians, often taking the form of jewelry. Bling is usually oversized and meant to draw attention.