About the Artist
Weston Del Signore is a mixed media artist, primarily focused on graphite illustrations. Though he typically pulls upon the processes of automatic and intuitive drawing, Del Signore also references his and his family’s identities through his illustrations. Inspired by Roberta Matta, Laurie Lipton, and Francis Bacon, his work grapples with memory, repression, and Jungian psychology’s conceptions of “the shadow.” These caged, often repressed thoughts are manifested into large scale artworks utilizing graphite, charcoal, oil pastel, acrylic, or a combination of any of these materials. Through his practice, Del Signore confronts the underbelly of consciousness by pushing and pulling, bending materials until they resemble the underpinnings of repressed thought.
About the Work
Vellum is a mixed media artwork, utilizing graphite on paper and vellum installed with metal bolts. The subjects of the work are the artist and his maternal grandfather, exploring the disparities not only within their appearance but also within their vastly different experiences and environments growing up in the United States. Though imperatively intertwined, the relationship between them would have been near impossible growing up in his grandfather’s time and place; St. Louis in 1945. Though they look nothing alike, Weston’s relationship with his grandfather is inseparable from his reality now. Vellum grapples with concepts of identity, community, memory, and family through the lens of “passing.”