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Outsider Art Fair, Metropolitan Pavilion, NYC, 2024, 2025

M. David Gallery, Art Cake, Brooklyn 2025

Quirky D. Circus, Radiance Arts, Provincetown, July 2024

Dioramas in Dialogue
by Paul D’Agostino

Fantastical fabulations, dynamic figurations, delightful pastiches, soulful characterizations, material curiosities, narrative insinuations, and atmospheric theatrics of secret histories and escapist mysteries abound in Dioramas in Dialogue, a group showcase for Outsider Art Fair, presented by M. David & Co. Gallery, featuring new artworks by six contemporary artists: Marilyn Banner, Cynthia Sparrenberger, Ellen Anthony, Patricia O’Maille, Claudia Renfro, and Phyllis Famiglietti. Presenting their works in three collaborative pairs, these artists tell obliquely apparent yet distinctly compelling stories of joy and grief, life and loss, lessons learned and successes earned, and real-world struggles and dreamworld marvels. 

It’s not a recipe these artists arrived at overnight. As is the case for many artists, it’s an exploratory ethos that results from a mixed bag of creative experiences – from a lifetime of working instinctively and by trial and error, to mentoring and training inside and outside of institutional settings, to developing skills honed through various personal and professional pursuits that eventually make their way into artistic expression in the studio, especially once it’s possible for a devoted studio practice to become a primary focus. This same mixed bag of experiences is also one that, for some artists – despite how genuinely enriching such a nonlinear creative background can be – might nonetheless lead to limited exhibition opportunities or exposure in the art world, particularly when one’s artistic practice is held in check by family life and family loss, personal and interpersonal tribulations, and variable modes or extended periods of social or geographical isolation. Pursuing a professional path as an artist is ridden with circumstantial challenges even without so many additional limitations, so the sum total can amount to quite a lot to overcome. Nurturing material enthusiasms, however, and staying active in the studio by staying actively curious, can make many such real limitations seem immaterial. 

It’s no surprise then that the artists in Dioramas in Dialogue, given their common ground in mixed-bag artistic recipes and diversified, at times challenging creative backgrounds, operate within a shared sphere of assorted, bountifully expressive abstract aesthetics and narrative thematics. These characteristics are readily identifiable for each artist individually and for the group of six as a whole, and they come into particularly delightful, formally complementary focus through the collaborative installations they’ve developed by working in pairs. To this end, the artists’ aim was to convey a sense of shared staging, dioramic interplay, and implicit dialogue among their works. Hence Marilyn Banner’s profoundly spirited, loosely delineated figurations on richly textured raw surfaces, casually accented with loosened threads splayed out at the fringes, alongside Cynthia Sparrenberger’s charismatic sculptural characters, including a sassy rabbit strutting along like a tiny giant storming onto the scene, with a cheerfully defiant gait, from an unseen land of make-believe at stage left. Hence, too, Ellen Anthony’s rustically charming, theatrically charged bricolage sculptures perched and dangling, as if idling in wait in an obscure puppet master’s secret workshop, among Patricia O’Maille’s nimbly rendered, soulfully folkloric, storybook-suggestive apparitions that seem to have emerged wholesale, with human and avian likenesses, onto vintage-like papers from some mystical ether. And hence, as well, Claudia Renfro’s deftly embroidered, colorfully embellished, fabulously animated tableaus of cartoonish figurations fantastically rejoicing in whimsical reverie, parading around next to Phyllis Famiglietti’s painstakingly assembled, sympathetically amusing composite sculptures that scan as humbly engineered toys or elemental automatons discovered on the tool-cluttered workbench of an inspired tinkerer. 

The artworks in Dioramas in Dialogue inhabit a world of intrigue, imagination, and mystery where the preciousness of life and fundamentality of fun have been lost on no one. It’s a place where quieted acoustics whisper variable narratives that present as visually vociferous, even raucous. In this collaborative exhibit, the artworks on display are in contextual dialogue with one another while speaking to viewers individually, jointly, and collectively, with an array of potential narratives lingering among them. Some such stories are hinted at by the artists themselves in their artworks’ titles, as well as in the rich and insightful reflections they composed about one another’s works on occasion of this special show. There’s a lot to explore and interpret in Dioramas in Dialogue, and a lot to relish. Unambiguous throughout is that harnessing the creative spark of joy – a long-sought, hard-fought-for, and hard-won recipe for success – is an indispensable part of the artistic process.

– Paul D’Agostino, Ph.D. is an artist, writer, educator, curator, and translator.