ANN TARANTINO’S FLAG FUTURES
SATELLITE Art Show, miami 2018
Ann Tarantino works across drawing, painting, installation, and site-specific works of public art. She travels across media and through scales ranging from intimate to immersive, often working at multiple scales within a single piece. Everything—from a small drawing to a large-scale installation—is in dialogue with the place in which it is installed. For SATELLITE, Tarantino will anchor a custom, 12-person tent titled Flag Futures to the asphalt.
Tarantino offers visitors an escape from a hectic day of art fairs (and the world at large) with her16-foot-diameter, colorful tent. When thinking about the heat and sun of Miami, the hectic pace at which viewers see art, and the current political climate in the United States, Ann chose to create a safe space for SATELLITE where a group of people could come together, shielded ever-so-slightly from the outside.
The tent’s fabric is opaque in parts, translucent in others, and colorful all around. Dazzle painting—a ship camouflage technique used extensively during WWI where painted geometric shapes were used to make the speed, size, and location of a ship difficult to assess—inspires the patterning. Each dazzling module in the tent’s construction is based on an amalgamation of national flags. Tarantino took many of the world most recognizable flag patterns and created multiple new variations as a nod to the future and globalization.
Those who enter the tent during daylight will be bathed in the color of imagined future flags, the sunlight softened through the fabric. Those inside will be hidden. At night, the experience will be a more contemplative one with the glow of solar-powered lights making the tent more womb-like. While safe inside the dome, the silhouettes of those inside will be visible to the outside, collapsing private and public, inside and outside, and making the flags a flimsy barrier.
Tarantino received her BA from Brown University and her MFA from Pennsylvania State University. Her work has been exhibited widely in the US and overseas in contexts ranging from museums and galleries to botanical gardens and city streets. She is a 2016-17 Fulbright Core Scholar for artistic practice in Brazil. Recent exhibitions and projects include Cloud Countries, a new installation created for the Pittsburgh International Airport; Watermark, a major public commission for the community of Millvale, PA; and Razzle Dazzle, a 400-foot-long painting installation running beneath the Brooklyn Bridge, commissioned by the New York City Metropolitan Transit Authority. Born in Wellesley, MA, she is currently Assistant Professor of Art at Pennsylvania State University.
