July 22, 2009 - Grinning skeletons insert themselves between dance partners, strum a ukulele and join in a campfire cookout in Mary Mazziotti's fiber works. They look so playful that it's a surprise to learn that she was inspired by photographs of unclaimed bodies in a morgue.

In her works, Mazziotti bares our culture's disavowal of the notion of aging, much less death, through a plethora of products and services that promise eternal beauty and health. Her artistic expression is populated with reminders -- memento mori -- "that life is fragile and death is the universal destination," the Pittsburgh artist says.

But her work is hardly grim, as is evident in her fanciful solo exhibition, "Domestic Death: Contemporary Memento Mori in Textiles," at Borelli-Edwards Galleries in Lawrenceville.

Mazziotti was watching a Rick Sebak documentary on WQED-TV a few years ago when photographs of unclaimed bodies in the old Allegheny County morgue caught her attention.

"They were so evocative," Mazziotti says. "Should we remember them? Were they terrible people? Or someone's lost family member?"

She arranged to photograph some of the images, which were kept in a large cabinet mounted on wooden panels that a viewer turned like book pages. And soon the subject of death, symbolized by a skeleton, entered her creative expression.

Her first works -- black gothic paintings of "big scary death" -- were too stereotypical to please her. "The challenge was to say something that gets through in a new way."

She found her answer in vintage fabric. A skeleton peers out from behind the full-skirted figure of a Southern belle that had been carefully embroidered onto a table runner by a homemaker generations ago. Another talks to the slumbering sombrero-capped man printed onto a souvenir Mexican tablecloth. An altered bridge table cover redefines the game at stake.

The figures are imperceptibly integrated with the extant compositions via skillful placement, choice of costume or props, and precise matching of thread colors to those originally used.

Mazziotti, 58, especially likes working with domestic linens that project a "lovely, comforting, warm, homey feeling," where death's presence seems all the more disquieting, as in "Reading Girl," wherein a skeleton reads alongside a child and her dog. Besides oozing character, the old pieces add their own layers of decay, the owner/maker presumed dead, the cloth itself often showing wear.

Born in Forest Hills, Mazziotti was a drama major at Carnegie Mellon University but went into advertising and never worked professionally in the theater (sister Barbara Russell is the lauded Pittsburgh actress; sister Joan Kimmel, half of The Urban Gardener garden center, has a work in "Gestures" opening at the Mattress Factory Friday).

As a writer and creative director, Mazziotti lived in the Middle East, Jakarta and Singapore. And then she returned to Pittsburgh, settling in the West End. By then, she says, she was pretty "burnt out" and ready to change careers. She turned to art.

Mazziotti took painting classes and workshops led by Herb Olds, Connie Merriman and Kitty Spangler at Carnegie Museum of Art and the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts. But she is largely self-taught, learning to paint, draw, paper cut and do fiber work through perseverance and an eye to high standards. Besides Borelli-Edwards, she's represented by O.K. Harris Works of Art in New York. Her embroidered, 12-paneled "A Day in the Life of Death," constructed from scratch, captured the juror's award in the 97th Associated Artists of Pittsburgh Annual at Carnegie Museum of Art in 2007.

Here, she exhibits a whimsical multi-paneled bedspread (41 by 73 inches) with scenes showing "The Death of Death," including by explosion and by suicide with the help of a gas oven.

"Homage to Damien Hirst," a title applied to five faux skulls that Mazziotti embellished with costume jewelry and encrusted with glitter, is not so much honor as critique of the British artist, best known for his formaldehyde-suspended cows, and more recently embroiled in controversy over his alleged $100 million platinum skull covered with 8,601 diamonds. The granular sparkle of Mazziotti's skulls also call to mind the confections made for Mexican Day of the Dead festivities.

About a month ago, she began applying her designs, along with literary quotes, to vintage clothing. A size 8 black dress reminds that death calls at both the poor man's cottage and the king's castle. The text on a World War II sailor's uniform, enlivened with a tattoo-like death-as-mermaid, begins with poet Anne Sexton's "The sea is mother-death." A campy man's white dinner jacket wears "Memento Mori, Baby!" on its sleeve, while a skull-headed snake on the back slithers next to a red apple and below "When Adam was by Eve deceived ..." (size 44 long).

Such pieces were inspired by an engraving of a 17th-ccntury Death Crier whose clothing was embroidered with symbols of mortality, Mazziotti says.

"If we're willing to wear alligator emblems and little guys playing polo, why not become billboards for a message with real meaning?"

Read more: http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/09203/985376-437.stm#ixzz0LzihmrMW

Publication: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

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