ARTIST STATEMENT
Pathos in art is an age-old tactic, yet its purpose to persuade and provide an emotional corridor between art and viewer has the power to create Oneness. Indivisibility. Connection.
As an artist and social activist, my work reflects the forces that haunt our society, our community, our families and loved ones. Struggles, that can be felt and experienced by all, infused by subjects like rawness of addiction, mental illness, isolation, despair, social injustice…and importantly, hope and faith in our shared future.
My studio tells its own story, a narrative of inspiration, passion, vulnerability, and hope. The technical aspects of the art made here are just as stimulating as its emotional and aesthetic intent. I employ older sculpting methods such as blacksmithing, ironworking, and sand casting, while utilizing CAD software to deliberate, draft, build and eventually communicate with the foundry. The experience of using heat, pressure, or even a simple hammer to coax metal into shape, derives a sense of pleasure and accomplishment that is immeasurable. The burnt fingertips, perpetually dirty hands, the cuts, and bruises, all culminate in the finished works, often merging painting and sculpture to create something experiential. In this transition from contemplation, subliminal inquiry, to physical manifestation.
Seeing the world through the lens of an artist, an activist, a brother, a father, a husband, a friend is to illustrate the often complicated “human” elements of life. The work agitates and disturbs the habitual reasoning that we all succumb to in order to cover what/who we do not want to interact with. The hope is to provide the human context that will remind us why and how we need to confront injustice.
In my ambitious, personal, and controversial project, the Opioid Spoon, a symbolic eight hundred pound, ten-foot metal replication of a simple household utensil modified to cook and inject opioids. The Spoon is crafted in honor of my own family’s struggles and those of thousands of families who have lost loved ones to the horrific opioid epidemic. To bring attention to the pharmaceutical industry’s malfeasance, who knowingly and with deliberate greed was complicit in this national crisis, I dropped the Opioid Spoon in front of major pharmaceutical companies and the FDA. It didn’t assuage my anger, but it gave me and hopefully others, a “David” vs. Goliath moment as a national symbol of this epidemic, and our right as a community to seek justice and a healthier future.
“Hear artist/creator Domenic Esposito talk with Mountainside director of community development Dan Smith about how art, activism, and recovery intersect to achieve awareness about the opioid crisis.”
— Sarah Cascone, Artnet, 11/4/19