Amalia Pica

In her sculptures, installations, drawings, photographic collages, and performances, Amalia Pica explores our desire to be understood, while highlighting the imperfections in our modes of communication. As she explains: “A lot of my work stems from that almost childish desire to be understood, and I think that a lot of the ways that we invent to talk to each other have to do with that extreme desire to reach…100% empathy with other people. That will never happen, but the fact that we try…is beautiful, somehow.” With understatement and elegance, she exposes our efforts in works like Switchboard, an iterative installation of tin-can telephones, whose crisscrossed strings make it impossible to tell which two cans connect. Pica is especially interested in examining the effectiveness of the artist as a communicator, and art—so often misunderstood—as a message.