ALL OF MY HEARTS


2022

VALENTINE AMARI




sometimes my love is like


a song with no name

a poem for you

a gaudy bouquet

a tale wild, yet true


a stretching sun

an ass you can feel

a pain that’s just begun

that only time that can heal


all of my hearts


Documentation by Victoria Xu














































































































V. Amari
2018 - 2021
 Digital Media, Photography, Animation, Sculpture, Handmade Paper, Poetry




Shield For My Lover (2018)
Papier Mâché, Plastic Roses & Assorted Flowers

In the creation of a hybrid object, this piece finds itself between a shield and a shell, as well as a tool and natural object. This enchanted item serves to armor its wielder, who in turn  act as a shield for themselves and the ones they love. This is the first piece in my body of work.

Also Shown In

LIST Art Center - Love:Love


Leung Family Gallery - Black Art’s Showcase 2022 -Multiplicity, not Monolith: Locating the Self Through Art














Our Mother’s Fears (2018)
Digital Media, 14X10in

This is the first series I made independent of my curriculum, which is representative of my experience in perceiving the world for its corruption and evils. Lying deep within my spirituality rooted in Baptism, I imagined the mythos of an omniscient mother deity (by appropriating sculptures made by Francisco Romero Zafra) that surveys the state of the world she forged, and chooses to take action by performing a final act of love to rescue it.  

O
ur Mother’s Hope for Salvation, in Preparation for Our Last Funeral
(left)
Our Mother’s Ultimate Sacrifice, Stripping Us of Our Blessed Corona
(right)


Also Shown In


Watson Institute for International & Public Affairs - The Americas

LIST Art Center - Love:Love


Leung Family Gallery - Black Art’s Showcase 2019 - Community of Love









CUPIDITY//MAMMON (2018)
Digital Media, 28x20in
cupidity - greed for money or possessions.
mammon - wealth regarded as an evil influence or false object of worship and devotion.

This series personifies late capitalist practices that have seeped into our quotidian lives, and those who benefit from our (seemingly) inescapable entrenchment within them. I have appropriated sculptures made by Francisco Romero Zafra and a painting by Thomas Cole in the aims of blending comedy, irony, and anguish through space and time.

Bank of King Cupid (bottom)

Amora’s Dilemma (not shown)

Damnation to the Binary (top)

Mammon’s Legendary Machination (left)

1% Eternal (right)

Also Shown In

LIST Art Center - Love:Love

SoLA Contemporary- Like Water




Saccharine (2019)
Poetry, Handmade Paper
(Cotton, Local: Knotweed, Mullen, Yucca, & Seaweed)
Mixed Media

saccharine - excessively sweet or sentimental

This mini anthology is comprised of selections from M. Tonnette’s poems, collected and printed onto paper that I made by hand from local mullen with yucca (for the central pages, with the backsides overlayed into the background behind the scans to show the imbedding), cotton pulp and knotweed (for the title page that I also hand pressed the title into), and seaweed (the final page). I lasercut leather and attached clasps to form sheaths to hold the pages. In this process, I have been able to understand this artist and her longstanding poetic practice more concisely, as well as identify the natural overlaps in the themes present in our work. This exists as a numbered edition, with 4 copies of this book existing. One staying with me, another at home, the third with my professor that taught me the art of printmaking/bookmaking, and the last one residing
in the Special Collections of the John Hay Library.

“I Want To Fall In Love”
“Absolutely Necessary”
“A Restoration”
“Peace & Blessings”

©️M. Tonnette 1997-2012

Also Shown In

LIST Art Center - Love:Love

Tiny Exhibit - Paper or Bioplastic

Leung Family Gallery - Black Art’s Showcase 2019 - Community of Love

North House Art Show - Paper or Bioplastic

Leung Family Gallery - Black Art’s Showcase 2022 -Multiplicity, not Monolith: Locating the Self Through Art













ANGLYPHS (2020)
Digital Media, 14x10in
glyph - a heiroglyphic character or symbol; a pictograph

The next step in my linework practice was to organize complex patterns and build upon them to create a visual language from the resulting glyphs. The glyphs’ entanglement and illumination traverse communication, recognition, gesture, and ethereality via abstraction.

Lovers (top)

Believers (bottom)


Also Shown In

LIST Art Center - ANGELOLOGY














YLM (You Love Me) (2020)
Digital Media, Concrete Poetry, 14x10in
Special Thanks:
Jill Scott
Solange


Inspired by the repetitive proclamations of love in songs like He Loves Me (Lyzel in E Flat) by Jill Scott and Beltway by Solange, I decided to create a morphing, melting, series of images combining the beauty of repetition in movement, form, and word. This piece serves to replicate the sensation of discovering love for another all over again, and again, and again.

Also Shown In

LIST Art Center - ANGELOLOGY























Nucleotine Amari (2020)
Digital Media, Photography, 20x15in, 10x10in
Special Thanks:
alexis roman

nucleotide - a compound consisting of a nucleoside linked to a phosphate group, forming the basic structural unit of nucleic acids such as DNA

My exploration in linework culminates in the enchanting and mystifying of my self portraiture. Intersections of inherited histories, gifts, and genetics constantly influence and inform how we determine our power and worth.

Valentine Solari

Runnin Through My Veins (not shown)

Valentine Paradi (not shown)

Amari Aeternam (shown at opening artist talk)

Also Shown In

LIST Art Center - Love:Love


SoLA Contemporary- Like Water


RISD Gelman Student Exhibition Gallery - Black Biennial

LIST Art Center - ANGELOLOGY





















Moondial (2020)
Digital Media, Photography, 14x10in
moondial - a device similar in function to a sundial, yet only operates on the full moon

Using over a dozen photographs of the moon taken from my window, I utilize the interactions of glass and light to orchestrate duplications and afterimages that interact with each other as well as the original moons organized circularly. Repetition is integral to the technical and ideological foundations of this piece, becoming as ritualistic as my ancestral practices based on the lunar phases.

Also Shown In

LIST Art Center - ANGELOLOGY

 


2018-2022//Long Beach CA//Providence RI//Chicago IL