Risa Hricovsky

Lives and works in Knoxville, TN, USA

Artist statement

Risa Hricovsky creates artworks that punctuate space through pattern, color and their use of the multiple. Working though dichotomies such as order & chaos, attraction & repulsion and similarity & difference, Risa makes visual poems about perception. The work juxtaposes similarly colored materials with opposing properties, such as fired porcelain with soft sculpture or paper. In doing so, each material takes on characteristics of the other, giving rise to misperception and subtly introducing tension within the calm of repetition. Through this mimicry and indexical object making begins a critique of our ideological perceptions of different materials. Risa is currently working on three distinctive series, Fringe, Stranger and Future Rocks. Fringe is a sequence of shag rugs made of fired colored porcelain. Shag rugs are synonymous with the 1960s and its counterculture. These fringe pieces are as hard as they look soft. The porcelain rugs are a metaphor for the ideals of the 60s being frozen in sentiment and unable to engender substantial progress. Yet they still represent the contemporary idealism of radical transformation and the hope for a greater future. The term Strange Stranger comes from the book Hyperobjects written by Timothy Morton, an object-oriented ontologist and ecological philosopher. Morton describes the Strange Stranger as knowable but uncanny. In Risa’s work, the series Strange Stranger is a collection of sculptures made with different materials...

Artwork