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
I explore weaving, abstraction and color to express lived experience and reclaim pleasure. I draw on autobiographical stories of memory, addiction and loss to 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. Through creation, deconstruction and reconstruction I can rewrite the story and find self-fulfillment and actualization. I embrace vivid atmospheres of color, disintegrated patterns and gravitational cloth to excise these demons living in the dark and expunge them into the saturation of technicolor dreams and manifestations of joy.
I use the jacquard loom to investigate and reinterpret sentimental patterns from my own life and ancestry, merging the computer assisted technology into personal experiments of color, pattern and abstraction. This process creates repetitive levels of pattern and image manipulation resulting in a dissociative striped glitch effect, reenforcing the complexity of addiction and life within the margins. Off loom my actions are about reformatting the weaving. In a counterintuitive act, I cut up my freshly designed and woven pieces, fray them, resew and patchwork them back together in amorphous shapes curving against the woven grain. I think of them poetically as a life that can be renewed, one that learns from its mistakes and changes.
Through reclaimed and secondhand fabric and materials, accessible acrylic yarn, natural and synthetic dye, paint, aluminum, and grommets I illustrate the complexity of experience. Mixing the soft with the hard, the stretched tension accentuating the fringe and frayed edge of the weaving highlighting the texture to draw the viewer into a sensual exploration of material. Living within the hybrid space of weaving, fiber art, painting, sculpture, installation, technology and craft my pieces are abstract celebrations that seek the joy in the aftermath.