Ella Rizzi
Melbourne (Naarm)she/her
Imitami, 2024-25
Imitami is a collection of works exploring the indiscriminate parts of my past - like a day at my grandparents' house or an image of an unacquainted, long-past ancestor in a photo album. With reference to family archive and photography, the collection has recurring symbols and differing states of recognition or familiar figurations; they share only a glimpse of familiarity. The paintings oscillate between confusion and understanding - loss and recognition. The works tell a narrative, much like reading pages of a diary or flicking through a photo album - telling the intimate feelings and showing singular moments, but falling short of revealing a complete, understandable narrative.
The collection investigates the concept of memory - how memories evolve with idealisation and how photography influences our memory.
Reviewed by Rachel Liu, Mass Memo Review
Exhibited at VCA Graduation Show.
Exhibited at West End Projects for Bloom: Grad Show.
Imitami (The woman on the stairs), 2024
A sub-collection, visualised through the repetition of a singular found photograph. I focus on the image of a woman on stone steps, staring into the camera lenses; an unacquainted ancestor, a woman I never met. This unfamiliar face that oscillates, that becomes my own, becomes my grandmother, and again, becomes a stranger. In each painting I find clarity, desperately grasping at the imagery, selectively and obsessively trying to understand my past, my identity.
Exhibited at Trocadero Projects.
Imitami (Valentina), 2024-25
Imitami (Valentina) is a collection of works that takes focus on the past, through the repetition of a singular scene modelled from personal photo archives. Each painting presents this scene from a new perspective, uncovering and unravelling the abstracted forms that create an unidentified woman. Like a camera shuttering or a person blinking, eyes glaring in and out of the sunlight, the recurring image comes and goes between paintings. This uncertainty evokes the feeling of alienation arising from the detachment of one's history. An ode to Valentina, my grandmother, and an obsession with trying to understand, to romanticise, and to become.
Exhibited at Bargoonga Nganjin, North Fitzroy.