Shared Ground
Dennis Santella, Nicholas Santella and Anthony Santella
May 6 - June 30, 2017, Main reception Saturday June 3, 2-7pm

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Fall 2016 preparations: Nicholas Santella planting a circle of rye at Street Road.

"When the logic of history hungers for bread and we hand out a stone,
we are at pains to explain how much the stone resembles bread."
-Aldo Leopold, The Land Ethic

In Shared Ground artists and brothers Nicholas, Anthony, and Dennis
Santella reflect on our relationship with the earth and the threads of
fruitfulness and conflict that bind us to a place and identity.
Working in diverse media, the brothers work is united by a focus on
craft, the environment, and forgotten, sometimes dark, corners of
experience. Together, their work is a multi-layered view of a shared
heritage of craft and conflict.

Anthony’s wooden and mixed media sculptures merge human and plant
sometimes literally rooting the figure. In his work, storm-downed
trees are reshaped into ritual objects for navigating loss and trauma.
Dennis’ photographs of the overgrown remains of Italian WWI trenches
and of Harlem, NY community gardens under siege by new development
highlight the human urge to cultivate and destroy and the slow but
constant march of nature. Nicholas’ steel recreations of Italian arms
and agricultural implements underscore this tension between tending
and violating. 

At Street Road in Spring-Summer 2017 these visions will be unified in a collaborative outdoor installation of sculpture that combines elements of agriculture, ritual and defensive warfare, tying the work together and literally to the sustaining earth.