"Wink" Acrylic on cut and collaged paper by Anthony Iacono.

Fellowship winner revels in humor, and your discomfort

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Anthony Iacono wants to bring you into his world, and maybe even make you laugh.

“It’s this perverse world,” said the graduate student in Virginia Commonwealth University’s Department of Sculpture and Extended Media. “If [you] could laugh — actually, that’s a really good message. I love to make people laugh. I do think the work is based on my dark sense of humor. Even if just one person laughs, that’s a win.”

Even if just one person laughs, that’s a win.

Iacono received the Toby Devan Lewis Fellowship at the end of April, marking the end of a long month of thesis presentations. The $10,000 stipend is awarded each year to one student from each of the 10 best art schools in the country to be used as the winner sees fit.

Iacono has worked tirelessly over the past two years, said department chair Matt King, with faculty and peers recognizing his accomplishment.

“This is a wonderful affirmation of what can happen when artists take on the challenge of immersing themselves in concentrated, serious work,” King said.

Iacono’s passion for the arts began when he was a boy.

“I grew up just outside of New York City, and we’d always go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art,” he said. “Once I got older, I was able to walk around there by myself. I’d go to the city all the time, and sort of get lost in the museum — in the modern and contemporary collections.”

Iacono has had experience working in many different media, from sculpture and illustration to what he works in now, collage. He plans to continue using collage as a primary medium, but will not let that restrict him.

“I have some ideas of how they'll change a little, but they’ll still be collages for sure,” he said. “I’m sort of a control freak. I like piecing everything together. It’s really good for my OCD, the process. … I think it’s why collages are so satisfying to make.”

While he has moved fluidly between media throughout his career, the aspect of tension and eroticism has remained a staple of his work.

“[In] a lot of these, there’s not really actions taking place, it’s sort of between actions,” he said. “There’s this tension built up where something has just happened, or something is about to take place. … I distill the imagery as much as I can until it becomes this conservative eroticism. It’s the boundary between erotic and unerotic, you know what I mean? There’s definitely sensuality, but these figures are alone.”

Iacono’s use of sexual imagery, violence and the encapsulation of the two within paper cut and painted collage still life creations make his work a particularly sumptuous and thought-provoking experience. Iacono described one work, “Peep Show,” as an introduction to his thesis.

“This was a poster for my thesis show here,” he said. “It was the first piece you saw. It was like an invitation to come in. I do think that piece is the most erotic thing I’ve made.”

Iacono’s work is both divulging and detached, said Lauren Ross, curator of the 2017 M.F.A. exhibitions.

“In his thesis installation, he incorporated these painted works into an enigmatic and alluring environment that incorporated fetishistic materials and unexpected vantage points through peep-hole-like apertures,” Ross said.

“Repeat visits to his installation revealed that he made subtle changes to its configuration over the run of the exhibition, further enhancing its playful and unpredictable nature,” she added.

Presented in April, Iacono’s senior thesis show draws from an experience he had while traveling abroad in Germany last year. He titled the thesis “Darkroom,” and hung his collages on walls of stretched, black tarp — an abstract version of a back room he noticed while visiting a club in Berlin.

“It’s pitch black. You can’t see anything,” Iacono said of the room in the club. “That’s sort of what launched my whole thesis installation.”

With the time and money afforded by his fellowship selection, Iacono plans to stay in the studio.

“I’m going to move somewhere, maybe New York, Chicago or Philadelphia, he said. “I’m just going to keep making work.”

 

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