The Palace at 4pm 

Vittoria Di Stefano

The Palace at 4pm features a series of sculptural works using salvaged pieces of mid-century modern furniture which have been disassembled and amended with inlays and appendages of bronze, resin, silk fibre and plaster. An interior wall of the gallery is painted with a mural reminiscent of 1970s interior design. The installation resembles a deconstructed domestic space in which motifs of nostalgia combine with elements of incongruous materiality. Objects of ‘home’ are transformed, as meanings embedded in the forms and materials converge.

For this solo exhibition, Di Stefano has created new works to consider the confluence of the psychological and affective realities of domestic space. These works explore sites that hold contradictory qualities of intimacy, playfulness and pleasure as well as confusion, disorder and unpredictability. This solo exhibition explores the liminal nature of the domestic realm in which multiplicities of realities — real and imagined — shift and transform to produce states of flux and ambiguity.

Vittoria Di Stefano is a sculptor and installation artist making work on Kulin country (Melbourne, Australia). Within her practice she uses generative material experimentation to explore liminality, the uncanny, seduction and transformation.

Through the employment of a diverse material palette, and often using modernist art, design and film as points of departure, the artist employs a feminist critique to investigate and challenge historical power structures and notions of value. The psychological and affective impacts of the material encounter are explored through a range of experiments and display contexts, offering new ways of thinking about and experiencing material realities. She has taken part in solo and group exhibitions nationally and is currently completing a PhD at RMIT University, where she also lectures in Art History & Theory and Sculptural Practice.

Download the exhibition roomsheet here.