Deconstructive Forms: Recent Work by Steven Ceraso
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Second Avenue Firehouse Gallery and Performance Space
17 Second Avenue, Bay Shore NY 11706
631-669-3236 info@secondavenuefirehouse.com
Press Release 3/23/2008
Deconstructive Forms: Recent work by Steven Ceraso
Long Island Artist Steven Ceraso’s Welded Steel Sculpture entitled Deconstructive Forms, opens to the public at the Historic Second Avenue Firehouse Gallery and Performance Space, Bay Shore NY 11706, on April 6th, 2008 from 2 – 5 p.m. The exhibition will remain on view through May 24th, 2008. Building hours are Sundays, 12 to 4 p.m or by appointment.
Steve Ceraso’s recent work shows its customary blend of strength of image, excellence of workmanship, and powerful use of materials. Working most often with steel and wood and working often in sizes approaching the monumental, Steve creates a visual vocabulary that has the feel of the archaic; and even when contemporary forms are suggested, they contain trace elements of the mythic and the primal. The welded work is the product of high craft, but often the steel is rusted, or will rust in time, lending his pieces an air of the found and the lost, artifacts or armatures from a lost civilization. Or, as in this most recent work, the images hint at masks and ritual practices as if they belonged to a vanished cult or were worn by strange warriors in unimaginable conflicts. Or that these forms might once have had living inhabitants, like the carapaces of huge insects or the shells of primeval crustaceans. What I always appreciate most about this work is its true modernist stat!
ure in
which haunting, even mythic forms hover on the edge of being identified but remain firmly planted in a world of abstraction and suggestivity and in which the power of the artist’s imagination renders his materials fresh, arresting, and strangely disturbing, as if they belonged to the world of dreams.
- Peter Pitzele Ph.D.
This exhibit was made possible by the efforts of Susan Barbash President, South Shore Restoration Group. More information on Deconstructive Forms and other works, can be found at Steven Ceraso’s website at www.stevenceraso.com