BIO
Fernanda D’Agostino’s internationally exhibited installations incorporate sculpture, architecture, interactive video, projection mapping and sound in novel ways. Her work engages themes of movement and growth as catalyzed by phenomena of the natural world, alchemical transformation, complex networks, and human engagement with non-human communities. Having begun her career in the 1980s as a performance artist with a focus on body work, the body and how it engages with space and objects informs all her work. Although no longer performing herself, every installation includes a performance or other live event, and often the making of the work involves performative acts by collaborators. The connecting thread in all her work is placing viewers at the center of an all-encompassing interactive environment, in this sense the viewer becomes the performer in a “prepared environment.”
D'Agostino is the recipient of a Bronson Fellowship, Flintridge Foundation Fellowship, and Project Grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, Precipice Fund and Ford Family Foundation. She’s been a visiting artist at the American Academy of Rome and ArtPark, New York. Notable exhibitions include Festival de la Imagen, Colombia; the SoundWave Biennial, San Francisco; 1A Space Hong Kong; CyberFest, St. Petersburg, Russia; Video Guerillha, Sao Paolo; Suyama Space, Seattle; Western States Biennial, Brooklyn Art Museum; Fuori Festival, Italy; The Virtual Venice Biennale, The Map is not the Territory, Portland Art Museum; and Time-Based Art Festival, Portland Institute of Contemporary Art. Collaboration and community are central to D’Agostino’s work. She was co-founder and co-director of Mobile Projection Unit, where she worked to put projection mapping tools and skills into the hands of a diverse group of emerging artists, she is a member of the IN/body performance collective in Portland, and of Collective Action Studio, San Francisco. She is an active member of the CETI (A Creative and Emergent Technology Institute) Lab community, based out of Portland State University, where the focus is on lifelong learning and collaborative, interdisciplinary innovation in creative and emergent technologies.
“There is a profound and sensual tenderness in every detail, and it sticks with you after you have left the gallery”