BIO
Erica Dincalci was born and raised in the Bay Area, California. Her early education at Summerfield Waldorf School and Farm fostered her artistic side. She went to New York University for her AA in general studies, and transferred to California College of the Arts to be back in California and focus on art. She got her BFA degree in an individualized major, focusing on textiles, fashion and photography. After her undergrad she struggled to find her place, leading to many years struggling with drug addiction. During that time the intimate act of creating art helped refocus her life. She has gone on to pursue fine art and graduated with an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, in the Fiber and Material Studies department. Her focus is on weaving colors and exploring her life and experiences through art.
Her work has been featured in exhibitions nationally including at SPRING/BREAK art show, the de Young Museum, DiRosa Center for Contemporary Art, MarinMOCA, SebArts, and Co-Prosperity. Selected awards include educational scholarships, The Angeles Arrien Foundation Grant, Atlantic Center for the Arts Residency, Haystack Open Studio Residency, SebArts Emerging Artist Incubator Program, and Digital Weaving Residency at Praxis Fiber Workshop.
ARTIST STATEMENT
My practice is about exploring the interdisciplinary of weaving to express lived experience. I use autobiographical stories of memory, addiction, mental illness, queerness and loss, as a foundational place to make and create work from. I see cloth as the storyteller and conduit for the trials my body has experienced. Weaving and fiber manipulation is my way of embedding this material with information. I use the digital loom to make work that investigates and reinterprets repetitive patterns from my own life. I work through patterns taken from historical church mosaics from Sicily, or a tile from my ancestral town, or a wood carving from a renaissance frame and abstract them as I go, much like memory continually distorts. Through creation, deconstruction and reconstruction I can rewrite the story and find self-fulfillment and actualization. Through the inclusion of multimedia elements like metal, acrylic and ceramics I can further claim the complexity of experience and what it means to exist as a diverse individual. I embrace vivid atmospheres of color, disintegrated patterns and patchwork cloth as a way to excise these demons living in the dark and expunge them into the saturation of technicolor dreams. Living within the hybrid space of weaving, fiber art, painting, sculpture, technology and craft my pieces are abstract celebrations that seek the joy in the aftermath.