Volitia Loops Around and Lifts Herself Up

Private Collection, 2023

A family home is full of movement, a sturdy set of walls animated by a lively continuum of routines and thresholds, made vivid by laughter and debate, plans and surprises, friends and generations.

Volitia enters the great room with a series of color drawings: “Volitia likes to daydream”; “Volitia makes waves”; “Volitia begins again”; “Volitia loops around”; “Volitia says go”. She begins with a daydream and ends with GO! Swooping in and up, with a characteristic muscular flutter, Volitia mediates all manner of vibrant transitions, from outside to inside, from repose to imagining.

Architectural conceits, moldings and slants, interrupted elevations, an abbreviated balcony - become site-gags, built beats to riff on, making the room, with all its physical and metaphorical specialties, Volitia’s partner and collaborator. Light, delivered through windows framed high and low, becomes a character. With humor and gentle fluency, Volitia engages the space she finds, opening herself to experiences of acceleration and focus, concentration and dispersal. As any good monopoly player knows, landing on “Go” can be a strategic treasure trove. For Volitia, it is an opportunity for transformation.

This “living” room holds time, a backward and forward, wandering, ascending kind of time that finds before and after embedded in corners, on steps and along walls, time that blows in and out through windows and doors, makes grottos and phrases, reaches, bounces, tucks and soars, turning “present time” into air. Reading from left to right, especially in this double-gesture adventure, leads to playful subversion. Like Buster Keaton in “Steamboat Bill, Jr.” Volitia flies in the face of changeable conditions, collaborating with her environment, defying gravity, in order to conjure herself yet again. Volitia loops around and lifts herself up.