groundwork
naked city
Building
Nave
To supplement the fragment
The Apple Stretching
Dog Eared Reverie
Storefront
Local Objects
Framework
I used to be a tree
groundwork
Public Gallery
London, ENG
January 16 – February 15, 2025
London, ENG
January 16 – February 15, 2025
ACM
T-shirts, thread, old pillowcase, various found clothing and fabric, steel, enamel paint, acrylic paint, silver brazing, lost/found shoe heel
19.75 x 16.625 x 20 inches
I drew up the groundwork for this piece to be reminiscent of a basilica floor plan. The yellow curtains made from an old pillow case hang slightly below that floor plan, which is also a balcony. The frame has layers of peeling blue paint that don’t quite match, as if repeatedly repainted but never getting the right blue. Two black t shirt shoulders as side awnings. On top, scraps of found fabric that teeter on nothingness fall off the bone. This thing feels like a whale or train emerging from the wall, pushing out with its parts falling down.
VJC
T-shirt, found window screens, gold earring, various found material, brass wire, steel, silver brazing, lost/found shoe heel
18 x 20 x 6.375 inches
I’ll never be able to look at window screens again. I have a relationship with the material now, having torn it apart line by line, noting how it frays. Some screens become brittle over time while others become soft like cloth. I’ve collected bits of gridded material like these screens for a few years and the best I could do, what felt right, was to hold and consider each scrap and make a small dainty curtain with a few.
HRM
T-shirt, steel, rust, silver brazing, lost/found shoe heel
22.5 x 22.5 x 9.25 inches
This is the 3rd in a sub series exploring this form. 3 sculptures, 3 chambers in each, all the math for each form divisible by 3. The shape references a type of church, via two intersecting awnings. Among many other things, I see awnings as urban cloisters, creating a social space for people to simply stand, smoke, shoot the shit. This piece has a surface made from a single sun-bleached black T-shirt, rearranged and sewn to create competing gradients, with its collar hanging in front. The frame alternates between polished silver welds and rust. The caged up heel is probably around 120 years old, found at Dead Horse Bay in NYC.
NOP
T-shirt, found parking sign, steel, enamel paint, acrylic paint, silver brazing, lost/found shoe heel
21.5 x 16 x 12.25 inches
I knew I wanted a piece of weathered red sheet metal for the smaller awnings, with a white edge for scallops. I looked all over for weeks. A few days after getting my car towed, I realized the city's "no parking" signs are perfect. The top teal canopy is a sunbleached shirt I found in the California desert back in 2021.
Carideo’s practice begins by mapping discarded items into a diary for later retrieval, giving time for a palette of wear and tear to emerge. Gathering t-shirts, fabrics and repurposed sheetmetal from various locations, from a beach of Sicily to a desert in New Mexico to wasteland in Brooklyn, his accumulated materials are an exercise in endurance – the survival of a material uniquely defined by varying degrees of age, discoloration, fading, and frayed edges. Embracing their heightened temporal specificity with attention and care, Carideo’s collected assemblage of materials carry the conditions of where they were found, remarking on the social and environmental, the individual and the collective.
Found materials are brought together to adorn Carideo’s meticulously hand made structures, manually cut, bent, welded and steel-brazed by the artist, articulating the passage of time through layers of chipped away paint, patina and rust. His scaffoldings reference architectural details such as archways or thresholds that repeat asynchronously and persist across time, translated and reconfigured in different cities and contexts like an architectural echo. ACM (2024), Carideo’s largest and most complex work to date, footnotes the floorplan of a Romanesque basilica, and simultaneously flickers with a likeness to the window security gates often found in New York. Contrasting shades of blue measure its age by mapping patterns of corrosion, as if painted and repainted again. Incorporating the battered shoulders of a black t-shirt and an old yellow pillow case as curtains, it is a playful, almost carnivalesque structure, and nevertheless a portrait of intimacy and quiet solitude.
Tailored fabric collages envelop each silver-brazed construction, often assembled by threading through the original shirt seam, emphasizing the relationship between the surface materials and the structure beneath, further inviting a viewer's intimate gaze. In NOP (2024), the artist references a common red residential awning in Queens, mirroring the one outside his house, cut and rearranged from a “no parking sign” to form the curvature of an awning. Within the sheltered reliquary, a shoe heel tunnels into the wall – its darkened and worn rubber signifying the vanishing point at the work’s center. Like the worn fabric that forms the sculpture’s exterior, the shoe heel also retains the indentation of their wearer’s footstep.
Carideo nourishes his art on this intimate connection between the human body and the built environment – as a pictorial allegory for doorways, portals, archways and simultaneously as entry points to considering an individual and their journey. He examines the exteriority and interiority of sculpture, as a place of shelter and protection, and as our passage to the outside world. The work can also be read as political in its concerns, calling to mind Rosalyn Deutsche’s treatise on the politics of public space. It relies on the viewer’s memory and moments of nostalgia, experienced individually yet shared by the collective. As miniature enclosures, they signify the protection offered by safe shelter, uniquely poignant in our age of growing environmental fear, refugee crises and political turmoil.
- Public Gallery