121.9 x 142.2 cm
I thought of the title "Evil Microwave (A New Era in Cooking)" while I was melting large amounts of glycerin soap blocks in my microwave. I poured the liquid glycerin into a rubber mold of my face shaped like a bar of soap. After doing this for a week I felt like I was cooking up my own clones.
Hesse Flatow is pleased to present the debut solo exhibition of oil paintings by Francesca Facciola. Facciola's paintings create a peculiar parallel universe, corralling stream-of-consciousness images with obsessive attention. Textures of hair, fur, metal, and marble are rendered in precise and luscious detail. Facciola's diverse imagery is all pulled from strings of her personal memories. In "Parallel Universe," Facciola depicts the moment when, as a toddler, she decided to never eat raisins again: a split in the fabric of time creating an alternate universe where a raisin-eating Fran exists, nibbling from a mirrored Sun-Maid box.
It is these kinds of intense and lighthearted imaginings that Facciola offers: humorous on their surface, but treated deeply seriously. A drunk sewing machine sews its own flag: "CABIN FEVER," it cries as it lurches off the table into a sky of wispy clouds. A contour pharaoh emerges from Facciola's parents' marble shower wall. The saintly figure of Miss Piggy materializes in a hunk of raw chicken being prepped. The inanimate pulses and morphs under Facciola's scrutiny, sticky glycerin becoming the artist's own smiling face.