Lydia Viscardi

Lydia Viscardi, Let Go and Let Be_2017_found digital photography, colored pencil

2018

Lydia Viscardi is best known for her representational mixed media collages that combine highly detailed realistic painted and drawn imagery with flat shapes cut out from patterned papers and fabrics. Her work demonstrates a sustained interest in exploring the complex relationship between humans and animals. She is also fascinated with neuroscience and memory, particularly childhood memory, and how it informs adult identity. Viscardi mines her own childhood and past for potent experiences that she depicts with both humor and an uneasiness that creates psychological tension. This irony imbues her two-dimensional mixed media Childworks and Recollections series and her assemblage sculpture. Viscardi teaches Studio Art at Quinnipiac University and Housatonic Community College and is a museum educator at the Housatonic Museum of Art and the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art. Selected exhibitions include the Drawing Center, ODETTA, Sideshow Gallery, Active Space, Brooklyn Fireproof and The Heckscher Museum of Art in New York, Center for Visual Arts in New Jersey and The Barnum Museum and the Housatonic Museum of Art in Connecticut. The complexity of memory, particularly the potency of earliest experiences and how these inform adult identity, is a primary focus of Lydia Viscardi's mixed media work. Childhood is innocent and benign, yet often fraught with fear and anxiety. The physiology of memory lies at the center of our identity, determining who we are and who we become. Additionally, she is quite interested in the complex relationship between humans and animals and our connection to our instinctive animal nature. Depending on cultural heritage and convictions, certain animals are exalted, revered, protected, feared, reviled, or loved as family members while others are thought of as commodities to be used for food, man’s bidding for labor or scientific research.