Bio: Ally DeRusso is a printmaker, photographer, and fiber artist working in Upstate New York. She explores concepts of memorialization, vernacular photography, and domesticity within her work. She graduated with a BFA in Studio Art from The College of Saint Rose in 2021 and has exhibited at venues such as Opalka Gallery and Albany Barn. In 2022, she was a recipient of an Individual Artist Regrant from Saratoga Arts. Currently, DeRusso is pursuing her MFA at the University at Albany.

Artist Statement: Through printmaking, photography, and fabric, I contemplate the use of vernacular photography as a mode of recording, preserving, and memorial. I am interested in the way images are central to our cultural experience and how photography has increased the role images play in our everyday lives and continues to become ever more present with new technologies. To explore this concept, I mine my own archive of images, from past and present. I seek to craft these photos into a physical existence by impressing them onto fabric through various printmaking techniques, enhancing their ontological being. The change in materiality evokes a stronger sense of remembrance. I consider the sensation I receive from the fabric’s touch, its malleability yet flatness, and its power to provide safety in uncertainty. Intuitively, I work through sewing together the fabric in an unorthodox way, like piecing together moments. An underpinning of domesticity is at play. The home is a vessel for storing our images, displaying them, and creating spaces of memorial in the everyday. Patterns act as adornments in the work, while also being images themselves, emphasizing the photographs represented. Floral motifs circulate the work as symbols of memorial, celebration, cycles, and renewal

Website: www.allyderusso.com

Social Media: @allyderusso_