ARTIST'S STATEMENT
Lavatelli’s artworks all express different facets of facing ecological grief, and explore the complicated emotions that arise from examining the triumphs and horrors of the Anthropocene.
The response to a confounding reality of ecological breakdown and impending collapse of both human and natural systems necessitate intellectual and spiritual responses and a groping for sense-making, understanding and coping mechanisms. While all the paintings are responding to consequences of ecological overshoot, some do so more directly than others, and all contain the same duality of both the glory and horror of human activity. Many of the abstract faces reflect both the monstrous nature of our complacency towards an ecocidal society as well as the innocence of the individual who did not personally bring forth those destructive systems. The work explores the confusion and grief of collapse and the response to look towards a nonmaterial worldview. The use of occult symbols, nature, skulls, demonic faces and tears refer to the emotions of existential angst, the mortality of our living world and individual selves and the desire to look towards the unseen forces that may transcend the materialist perspective that we are both blessed and doomed to experience.
POETRY
words are art too
Diminished dopamine
Dark energies and Advil ghosts abide... the bioelectrical signals of pain, a nervous system wracked with the frayed myelin fibers of coral reef die offs, acidic ocean smoothies made of microplastic and dragonfruit
Hypoxic connective tissue weakened immune system fuck-up
Heavy, thick guilt-paste smeared into every pore, every opening of lightness and joy smothered with a depressive murky anaerobic muck of dark thoughts fecund
Cosmic deadness, indifference and apathy paralyzing the living ecosphere
The sprawling suburban medusa of apathy casually and mindlessly turning the metabolism of every living cell into a hard plastic replica
Abandoned strip malls stand defiantly resisting the wears of weather and vines, just as the culture clings to a 'normal' no matter how blatantly unnatural or artificial
We eat forest, shit out cars and houses
Sucking on a lolly of polybrominated diphenyl ether
sprawling suburban medusa
A vague, green fog of dread. Knowing, but not really because none of us can really know.
An epistemological mystery
Green glowing haze
Diesel fumigating brain fog falls over neural parchment
--imagined material realities
There is no such thing as the future that was told to us and it will be a rude awakening when the regulars realize that nothing is as it was promised to be.
The assumption that all will continue to be as it is--some tweaks here and there, some incremental changes, but fundamentally will stay the same--is so baked in.
My whole life I believed there would always be out of season fruit at the store. Some people still think so.
The afterglow of glut of fossil carbon powered human desire fever dream,
The hangover from the rager just starting to threaten us, & like a desperate addict we try to keep the party going. The cocaine is all gone, maybe another shot? Maybe a joint to ease the beginning of the come down?
The madhouse plastic orgy. Fantasies from a past era. Playing in the dawn of destruction
Pickle ball on the titanic deck--cause why not? What does it matter? We have no say in how the destruction will pan out.
How does anyone else function on the planet? Why does no one else seem to mind that it's all falling apart? This isn't the death of retail this is the death of 100 to 1,000 species a year
Party in the USA
Coagulated cell phone sounds
Dopamine zombie sitting in a burning building
If I could only conceive of the most elegant idea then we would all be saved
10-step glyphosate skin care routine
Brittle plastic cookie dough
Anoxic algal saltwater spa retreat
Sterile lego forest of Demi Gods' dreams
Abiotic nanobot pollination machine
Obliterating endless thought loops of doom with ketamine
Self-loathing soup laden with self-care exercises to feel better about being momentarily temporarily spared from the direct experience of horror that is descending, multiplying exponentially accelerating
It is only a matter of time, but the uncertainty is a special kind of agony. Being spared, but only for a little while longer,
and being told to ENJOY IT WHILE IT LASTS
Enjoy the brittle plastic cookie dough hun, we won't have it long
madhouse plastic orgy
empty the dishwasher
fill the dishwasher
The dishes are clean
I am not satisfied
despair
Clashing buttermilk panfrying fingers and electrified eels
Please take me into your succulent jaws and rip me wide open so the starry-eyed grackles can make a feast of my flesh as they turn my insides into glitter and sparkles of flesh ignite into a new drab dance
One of smoldering, ashen and coal.
Distressed turns grey and I welcome you with my open arms!
All of the mush and muck and brown, smooshy crap that feels like a dissipated and washed out fire.
Wet coals and smoke
Wash me away!
Water me down until there is nothing left! Only purity, reflection, absence, calm and cool.
Flowers will emerge from all this drama—Big, fluffy and exuberant flowers
Ruffled and giddy and excessive—frivolous flower orgies of delight.
And in all of that there are diamonds of love
There are flower gems of light and petals and bittersweet persimmon love
The love that has been so ignored with ego claiming to be too embarrassed by it, too afraid of it.
Unflinching, vulnerable, naked, stark mad love
The sober love.
The love that just is. The love that is there when everything else has fallen away.
The clarity of already-known and never forgotten love that IS
The flesh sparkles made alit by those grackles
Ripped open by the jaws of that eel
That exuberance and life
Electric eels
Dead seals skinned and eaten.
Squirrels soup
icebergs melting
plastic grass
florescent light
exhaust fumes
Candlelight dinners with red roses wrapped in plastic on a refrigerator
Radon arsenic and well-water poison gas leak spills into the Atlantic
Boys go swimming in the hood
Curtain valence
asbestos and wine