“John Avelluto has set out to play with, undermine, and confound Italian American culture, toying with the existing linguistic and visual repertoire of vernacular references that all too often have gone underappreciated and unexamined. He positions his art at a cross road of what in Italian is referred to as contaminazione, those hybrid moments and places where ideas collide across ever shifting borders to create innovative articulations. John revels in mash-ups of transliterated sounds, images, products, and ideas where Italy and the United States converge. His artistic renderings referencing Italian American iterations of cultural touchstones such as "galama" (calamari) and "maloik" (malocchio; evil eye), deliberately spelled phonetically in non standard Italian, capture flashes of cultural encounters to highlight the profound and the ludic. John's current work riffing off the omnipresence iconicity of Star Wars' Darth Vader, whom he refers to as "the Imperial Neo-Futuro-Fascist," teases out the Italian connections through his use of text (the cinematic villain's Italian name of Lord Fener) and color (the nationalized azure of Italian politics and sports). His cultural appropriation is achieved through a visual legerdemain, a time consuming method whereby the artist layers numerous coats of acyclic paint to create strata of paper and plastic simulacrum, which he augments and then applies to a flat surface. Thus the meticulous process and deliberate craft are made material, and the notion of lavoro ben fatto, or work done well, becomes an integral element of the art object. The shape-shifting laser cutouts of these facsimile objects offer refracted takes on the subjects at hand be they a sealed helmet, a squid's tentacles, or an apotropaic gesture. Ultimately John Avelluto's recalibrations of suggested imaginaries offer possibilities for simultaneous reclamation and critique.”

Joseph Sciorra PhD Director of Academic and Cultural Programs The Calandra Italian American Institute