Viviane Rombaldi Seppey

Statement
I create works by exploring images and resources from my personal history and surrounding. The source objects, books, maps, images I use, hold an intimate connection to my wandering life and is informed by my immersion in various cultures, languages and ways of seeing or thinking. They are woven into personal and social narratives to explore ideas of place, identity and memory.

Maps
I began using maps found in my childhood home to relate to my heritage and identity. Symbolically, these maps represent the migratory nature of my personal and family history; physically and culturally, they are documents of my own transplantation. As public and personal sources in my collages and assemblages, they are fragments of a journey, witnesses to my own migratory life, and traces of the individuals, places, and memories that I have gathered along the way.

Technique and material
Source materials have always been important in my work. I use mostly parts of books, phonebooks and maps. They come from my direct surroundings. In order to keep the material integrity and its sense of history I often use it directly in my work in a very traditional way. I use an X-acto knife, scissors, glue and cut, assemble and redraw, compile and decontextualize the collected material.

The creative process
I work in series within a chosen concept that will determine the material and the form of the work. As a multidisciplinary artist I paint, draw, make collages and create sculptures and installations. These projects are all linked by recurring formal concerns, themes and meanings.

Viviane Rombaldi Seppey was born in Sion, Switzerland of Italian descent; she currently lives and works in New York. She has shown in numerous institutions including Contemporary Art, North Miami, FL; the Bronx Museum of the Arts, NY; the Hunterdon Art Museum, Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art, Pelham Art Center, Carriage House at the Islip Art Museum, John Jay College, Walsh Gallery at Seton Hall University and New York Institute of Technology, Rutgers University and the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Australia. In New York she had solo shows at the Kentler International Drawing Space, Summit Art Center, NJ, at Wave Hill – the Sunroom Project Space Program, and a window installation at Mixed Greens Gallery, NY. She was a Lower East Side Printshop Key Holder Resident, an AIM, Artist in the Marketplace participant, a resident at Bundanon Trust in Australia, at Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, MA, at Banff Center for Arts and Creativity in Canada and at Ucross Foundation in Wyoming.

Viviane’s Website: https://www.vivianerombaldi.com/Maps.html

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Maps Everywhere/NJCU