Rod Oneglia

Dances with Trees

2016

Rod earned his degree in Art History from Middlebury College and studied as a graduate student at The University of Florence, Italy where he concentrated in pre-Renaissance and Renaissance art. While there, he developed a deep affinity, a reverence actually, for the "non-finito" (incomplete) works of Michelangelo (The Unfinished Slaves, The Florentine Pieta, etc). Though he began sculpting in ceramic and in marble, he now work exclusively in the lost wax process and cast in bronze. His work focuses on a broken or unfinished state of the human figure, as if the sculptures have been lost or buried for centuries and recently discovered. Broken limbs and the abstraction of the bodies are meant to suggest that the works have been subjected to the vicissitudes of time, decay by the elements and the damages caused by unearthing. The use of contra-pose is nonetheless meant to convey a latent sense of power.