Judy Onofrio arJenniafer Onobfrio Fornees sque INTRODUCTION Judy Onofrio and Jennifer Onofrio Fornes have wanted to show together “forever.” I have wanted to show them together, if not forever, for quite a long time. Both desires have come together in Arabesque , a show that is as graceful and poignant as the name implies. When the idea for a mutual exhibit was forming, I visited a group show that included work by both mother and daughter. I knew then that Judy’s new sculptures that were just beginning to include bones and Jennifer’s mysterious figurative photographs would make a powerful, Jill Ewald engaging show. At that time I didn’t realize just how powerful. Judy had undergone cancer treatment, a process that altered both of their views of the material world. The culmination of their experiences and backgrounds, linked with such a life-altering situation, produced the work presented in this visceral, beautiful show. Judy‘s bone sculptures and Jennifer’s painted photographs combine in Arabesque to engage the viewer through humor, grace, and poignancy, while the art invokes a desire to explore its mysteries. JILL EWALD Director of Flaten Art Museum Support for this catalog was provided by the Ella and Kaare Nygaard Foundation, St. Olaf College Fine Arts Fund, and Dr. Burton Onofrio. Photography of Judy Onofrio work by Rik Sferra and Jennifer Onofrio Fornes work by M. Bass. 1 ARABESQUE by Cynde Randall When I asked Judy Onofrio and her daughter Jennifer Onofrio Fornes why they were presenting an exhibition together, Judy replied, “We’ve wanted to do this forever.” Forever is a compelling idea. It has no beginning, no end, and, magically, is most discernable in the present moment. In the here and now it is clear: the two are kindred spirits and serve as the staunchest champions for each other. As visual artists, mother and daughter are aligned on a core level. They share a preoccupation with the material realm, wielding near alchemical force to create, re-contextualize, or transform myriad objects into powerful works of art. Over the years, they have produced significant and divergent bodies of work: Jennifer’s Judy Onofrio and Jennifer psychologically charged art has lingered in the darker recesses of the world, while Onofrio Fornes Judy’s fantastic iconography has celebrated the abundance of life. Their most recent work, featured in the exhibition Arabesque , illuminates a shift in consciousness and material form that is nothing less than transformational. It may be said that Judy and Jennifer have reinvented themselves, releasing their attachment to earlier visual means and arriving at an aesthetic common ground that is both elegant and sublime. Here, the object or figure no longer invites a psychological or narrative read, but serves as a departure point for reflection on the great mystery and transitory beauty of life. @ In the early years, mother and daughter were steadfast companions. They spent countless hours working side-by-side in the studio or traveling on a never- ending quest for flea markets and outsider art, where Judy collected the multitude of objects she later incorporated into her sculptures. Judy modeled many things for her daughter. She is an amazing self-taught artist, an advocate for other artists, and a leader in the arts community. She is Judyland detail expansive in her thinking and fearless about exploring new territories. She main - tains exuberance for life and grand visions for her projects. Over the course of Jennifer’s childhood, Judy created large installations of clay sculpture, built fabric environments, created monumental wood constructions, and generated outdoor monuments and pyrotechnic performances. All of these things made an extraor - dinary impression on Jennifer, who, to this day, cites Judy as the most powerful influence on her artistic identity. When Jennifer left home in 1984 to pursue her life as an artist, it was clear from the start that she was immune to the conventional boundaries of media. As she developed her artistic practice, she found a voice that was uniquely her own. Jennifer often employed the object as a psychological surrogate. Often bound or confined, Jennifer’s surrogate objects spoke to the angst of entrapment and oppression, or mortality. The darkness of this early work was viscous, crusty, and Hidden Among Leaves palpably painful (and would inform her work for the next two decades). Like her 2 mother, as she continued to work and refine her aesthetic, she explored material cues of mortality, creating powerful works in the spirit of momento moris. Judy began to create jewel-encrusted shrines and sculptures from the assortment of objects she had collected for years. Like an obsessed magician, she incorporated literally hundreds of objects into each piece of art. These delightful, embellished sculptures embraced her passion for outsider art (e.g., the Watts Towers in Los Angeles and the Grotto in Dickeyville, Wisconsin) and her obsession with collecting. They became her signature on the national scene and setting the stage for her practice through the next decade. Jennifer, too, had engaged a new body of work. While she had always pursued the psychological self, in 2004 she embarked on a photographic inquiry of the physical realm, using her own body as her material subject. Some of her images read like strange dissected scientific specimens, divorced from any particular identity or era. Many are framed in oval or circular shaped antique hat-stretching Mrs. B frames, merging the sensibility of Victorian portraiture with a contemporary deconstruction of the “nude.” The animated feel of this work recalled the motion studies of early 20th-century photography and evoked a multiplicity of organic forms, such as wings, illuminated landscapes, or clouds. In 2007, as Judy was recovering from a serious illness, both mother and daughter experienced a profound shift in consciousness that resulted in a trans - formation in their art. Judy perceived a shift in her relationship with objects when she became interested in a box of bones that had been in the studio for years. The resultant series, Reclining Women, proved transitional. Several months into it, Judy created a radically different work called Bone Basket . “One day, I got Trace detail out of bed and went directly to the studio and began working with a pile of bones,” she said. Fixing together several large cow leg bones and pelvic bones, she built a basket-like structure. In the “basket” she placed a jawbone, still intact with its teeth, inset with a seductive, hand-carved pear. “I loved the color and flowing linear relationships of the bones. I knew that it was a real breakthrough,” said Judy. Bone Basket opened the door to a whole new way of working. A new way of thinking about bones came from Gallen Benson, her longtime friend, artist, and devoted student of qigong and native healing practices. “Gallen has been a transformative influence on my understanding of healing and enlight - enment. When we focused on the bones, he helped me to see them as energy; he showed me ways to work with both the physical and spiritual aspects of that energy,” Judy said. Now taking her cues from the palette and flowing forms of the bones themselves, Judy honed in on a new kind of rhythm. She prepared a series of large oval panels, painting them, layer after layer, with fleshy creams and whites, letting the paint pool, puddle, and drip into lakes of color. In some she embedded bits of mirror to capture the viewer’s passing reflection in the surface of the work. 3 To each oval she attached bones, curvilinear fragments of architecture, and a select number of hand-carved fruits and flowers, all of which she painted to match the creamy ground. “The color felt like an energy force, something pulsing with life,” said Judy. Her new palette evoked the freshness of life’s beginning, a primordial ground sprouting with organic forms, a place where anything is possible. The curves and swells of each composition create a never-ending arabesque of form. These new arrangements, while dismissing the narrative, continue Judy’s invitation to the viewer to linger over discrete objects and aesthetic detail. Simul - Bone Basket taneously, they call for a moving and flowing visual experience with the total composition. By releasing the narrative, Judy asserts the sublime experience of the present moment. Transcending the limits of representation, she presents reality in the first degree. For Judy, this work is a meditation on relationships. “To me, they feel like prayers,” she says. We cannot escape our own mortality when considering Judy’s sculpture. As we follow the flow, we can trust that our fear exists only through the limits of our comprehension. Jennifer, likewise, perceived a shift in her relationship to the object. In 2008 she began a new series of photographs inspired, in part, by the sacred dance of the Whirling Dervishes, the Sufi mystics who, since Rumi, spin to release their attachments and align with the divine. The Dervish’s moving meditation spins on a sacred axis, his long white dress and tall hat creating the shape of a cone, pointing ever skyward. Jennifer was intrigued by the perfect balance of this centered intention and the symmetrical form of the spinning body and dress. Deep Sleep detail Meditating on the Dervish and transitory organic entities, such as clouds, she set out to release the trappings of her earlier practice. Jennifer enacted a series of intense performances before the camera. Working in a ritualized way over many months, Jennifer created a series of large-scale gelatin silver prints. Painting sections of each print with dark, earthy oil pigments, she enhanced the depth of the dark and the clarity of the light (reminding us, too, that the photograph is but an object).