Bellavia Biography
Bellavia received her MFA from Alfred University and her BFA from Buffalo State College. She exhibits in local, regional, national and international shows, attending residencies and doing visiting artist lectures when the opportunities arise.
Her work can be considered multi-media as it includes Sculpture, Printmaking, Painting and Drawing. Her works use the materials at hand and are always original and challenging, bringing her own unique vision to the mediums she works with to transform the usual into the uniquely creative.
Click here to view and download Bellavia’s resume.
Artist’s Statement
The interests and development of my work span multiple disciplines and media including: sculpture, printmaking, drawing/collage, painting and casting. I have also experimented with performance and installation works. I enjoy blending various methods and materials, relying on the influence of those materials, the environment I am creating in, and the process itself to keep the works authentic. I am not content with an empty pursuit of aesthetics or intellectual clichés. I feel that working in mixed mediums gives my work depth due to the fact I am not limiting my voice to one mode of expression.
I rely heavily on the influence of materials and process to keep the work from becoming stuck merely in the cerebral experience of the viewer. I am interested in engaging them on a more visceral level. While I believe my work is best understood as a complex multi-dimensional self-portrait, I also believe that sharing with the viewer this personal odyssey of identity development is an effort to strike a universal chord with them. Humans seek inner development and that chord is the one that maintains it is necessary to know who we are.
I use images of the human body and I am often my own subject. Attempting to use the interplay between the assertion of ones sexuality/identity and the struggle to face ones own self, past and personal demons. I feel strongly that these images; beautiful, dangerous and disturbing images at times; I am exploring the potential in the body to challenge our relationships with our own selves and identities we perceive. While in my work there is always a hint of darkness underneath the beauty. Body can become the subconscious, and the identity can be formed or recreated through this process of forgetting incorrect things we learned along the way.
