About the Artist
Dante Cioffoletti creates paintings and soft sculptures from Earth, work pulled directly out of the dirt that inspired them. A campy DNA franken-fusion between the work on the wall and what resides around us. By bridging the gap between painting and sculpture, he is able to immerse the viewer in faux life – breathing on a still wall.
He spent the years of his education at the Rhode Island School of Design creating work centered around escapism and survival. During his education, Cioffoletti majored in textile design, creating soft sculptures using weaving, industrial knitting, and crochet. The traditional techniques used to create these sculptures strongly contrasted the freeform dyeing and after treatments used to finish these works. The work was then used for installations — combined with closed captioned poetry and self engineered audio.
So serious that it became silly, Cioffoletti defocused the sadness that fed his work, and prioritized the present. Now, in whatever way “grounded”, he uses his work to explore what surrounds him. Often inspired by the alien ways of life in the ocean, and the endurance of the creatures who call her home. Cioffoletti explores the search for one's own niche in the vast world around us. Instead of floating away from the world that has been so harsh, what if we sink?
Contact
