Roman de Salvo | Modular Macramé with Sconce, 2004
Past exhibition
Installation Views
Overview
Roman De Salvo
Modular Macramé with Sconce, 2004
Electrical conduit and hardware
79 x 58 in
200.7 x 147.3 cm
200.7 x 147.3 cm
Quint Gallery is pleased to present a 2004 electrical conduit work by Roman de Salvo this month at ONE. Throughout his career, de Salvo has been invested in the potential of electrical hardware like conduits, light bulbs and wiring, reinventing these common materials into maze-like sculptures. De Salvo is widely recognized for his unique approach to blending craftsmanship, concept, and irony in direct yet insightful ways. Spanning sculpture, installation, photography as well as functional objects, he often combines materials both earthen and manmade that represent the extremes between antiquity and modernity. On the other hand, his conduit works lean into and echo the infrastructure or architecture of the space on which they are hung: one can imagine the network of pipes and wires that run through the walls and ceilings of this building. It is in these networks that Roman de Salvo prefers to take a closer look. Through the addition of working bulbs, this electrical conduit work becomes a functional object, leaning into its decorative nature of a wall sconce with his play on the textile knotting technique of macramé.
De Salvo often returns to these materials over many years, sometimes remixing past works from a new conceptual angle, like his work Electric Picnic Redux which appeared at ONE in 2022 after being developed at his residency at The Timken Museum of Art in Balboa Park. Sometimes his use of natural materials turn out to be something else entirely, often encouraging audience participation like his public work Fountain Mountain, a functioning water fountain built into a boulder carved with trail-like channels around its surface at Mission Trails Regional Park in San Diego.
Roman de Salvo was born in 1965 in San Francisco, California and grew up in Reno, Nevada. He received his BFA from California College of the Arts in Oakland, California and then went on to obtain his MFA from the University of California, San Diego in 1995. His work has been commissioned with many notable institutions including the Musee d’Art Americain, Giverny, France; the Whitney Biennial (2000), New York, NY; the Public Art Fund, New York, NY; the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; the Timken Museum of Art, San Diego; among others. He participated in the 1994 and 2000 editions of INSITE, with installations in San Diego and Tijuana, respectively. In 2019, he participated in the Murals of La Jolla project with McCairn, a photo of a sculpture installed as a billboard in Bird Rock. This public work and its eventual removal then became the impetus for a 2024 solo exhibition and new body of work, O Petravia, at the nearby artist-run space, Two Rooms. De Salvo currently lives and works in Reno, Nevada.
Selected Works
