“D'Italia has drawn inspiration for these works from the "hills, farms, wooded and open land" that surround her home like "visual mantras." I understand this as an awareness and appreciation of infinitesimal difference and change within repetition and sameness. The more you chant a mantra, the more variation, albeit inadvertently, you bring to it . . . Each work brims with its own history and is suggestive of the history of the earth itself. In an interplay of chance and control, the richly worked surfaces reveal beautiful translucencies to layers underneath.”
— Britta Konau for The Free Press
Selections
Morris County Artist Network: Featured Artist Interview With Gabriella D’Italia
Clothing often reveals whether we live in an abundance or a scarcity mindset. Look at your most ordinary possession and ask yourself, “What part, or parts, of myself are reflected here?”
Interview with Pirie Jones Grossman for Authority Magazine How I Reinvented Myself In The Second Chapter Of My Life
"I am sensitive to the world around me. In art-making, styling, and costume design this has allowed me to make successful, intuitive choices about form and color. I am attuned to the ways the material world can effect both joy and suffering, in a personal way, but also in a communal way. It comes naturally for me to connect material decisions with abstract ideas and values. My Holistic Styling work and my business grew out of this very place. I formalized practices that help others make this connection by using their everyday things as a mirror and a lens. That is how the name of my business, Mirror & Lens, was born."
Interview with Chapter 89 Magazine
“Style is a mirror, reflecting back the truest representation of who we are, and a lens, the framework through which we can reshape our perspective—what we see and how we see. I think of personal style and artistic style as the most human pursuit. It gets at the heart of what it means to be an embodied spirit.”
About your everyday things, with Gabriella D'Italia
Find Your Voice, Speak Your Truth Podcast with Elissa Weinzimmer
Trailblazing Womxn Share the Work and Personal Boundaries That Have Completely Changed Their Life: Why sustainable habits will take you further than reactive tendencies.
27 founders share how they knew what type of company to start
A Window In: Gabriella D’Italia’s Apartment featured on Latonya Yvette
Art in Embassies, Doha 2014-2017, Exhibition Catalog
Art Current: Gabriella D'Italia at Asymmetrick Arts, Britta Konau, The Free Press
"I have written about Gabriella D'Italia's work in this column before; but she is continually and intelligently pushing into new terrain, so it would be difficult to repeat oneself in writing about it. The work currently on view at Asymmetrick Arts at first glance does not seem to have much in common with the quilts and fabric-based sculptures she contributed to a two-person CMCA show in 2011. Yet there are continuities and overarching concerns to this most recent body of work grouped together under the exhibition title Land Frames."
2013 Artist Listing, Double Feature, Britta Konau, Maine Home and Design
Something in the Water, Kolaj Magazine, Issue Ten, 2012
"Gabriella D'Italia, who is best known for her extraordinary OCD-textured "women's work" hand-made fibre works, was represented in several collage shows by her smeary material "landscapes" that superficially seem to be at odds with the pro-craft feminist view-point of her fibre work. But when the landscapes begin to unravel into material indulgence (they are extremely abstract) the literalism of their processes returns them - prodigal - to the textured design sense of fabric with a handmade cast. In other words, D'Italia uses collage to bring her painting full circle back to the meme of hand-crafred production by women."
Cutting Edge Looks Sharp at CMCA, Dan Kany, Portland Press Herald
"Much of D’Italia’s work is loose on the edges to reveal that the surface is sitting on as many as 10 or more layers — which results in a sense of supremely lush substance. And still, the artist plays up the intense process-oriented content of her work through references to the medium, personal skill and the notion of the modernist grid. Adding these qualities together delivers a keen sense of time — not the regular clock of muscle-memory knitting or embroidery, but something more self aware to the point of existential obsessiveness."
Art Review: University of New England makes the case for contemporary collage, Dan Kany, Portland Press Herald
Art Review: Brilliant show a study in conceptual depth, Dan Kany, Portland Press Herald
"The only Maine show I have seen with comparable conceptual depth, range and rigor was Gabriella d’Italia’s 2011 “Pieced” at CMCA — which (coincidentally?) also featured a fiber/sewing idiom. But while d’Italia’s work sizzles with destabilizing brilliance, Davis’ features a quietly appealing and approachable range"
FiberArts: Behind the Reflections, Interweave Press, July 2011
Contemporary quilt artist Gabriella D’Italia employs repetition and patterning in her new series Aggregate Indexes. Primarily monochromatic with simplistically shaped patterns, her newest pieces explore the perpetual and undirected nature of change. D’Italia mends these seemingly disparate modes of thinking in intimate designs, enacting
transformation through the recurring arrangement of form and color. Beginning with raw strips of cut fabric, her small-scale quilts are layered with labor-intensive traditional techniques such as handpiecing, handstitching, and embroidery. In each composition the artist embraces the relationship between making and materials to convey an
idiosyncratic sense of time and place.
Art Review: Biennial backs up good looks with visceral subtext, Dan Kany, Portland Press Herald
"If McAvoy weren’t championing such extraordinarily sophisticated artists as Gabriella d’Italia and Erik Weisenburger, it would be hard to say. McAvoy and Deeds have not given us an inclusive survey of important contemporary art in Maine, but a direct feed into some key currents that are here and now achieving critical mass."
Quilt National 2009: The Best of Contemporary Quilts: More Than 80 Inspiring Creations, Lark Books
Exhibition: "An Ordinall of Alchimy" Organized by Mark Dion and Robert Williams for Cabinet Magazine