RON DIORIO
Ron Diorio is an artist working in a variety of media including photography & video. His art has been exhibited internationally and is represented by Peter Hay Halpert Fine Art, NY. His photographs and publications are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Centre Canadien d’Architecture in Montreal, and the Getty Museum, Los Angeles. Ron’s current video work focuses on short personal essays, weaving spoken word, moving images, still photography, and content found on the Internet. Ron is VP, Business Development and Innvoation for The Economist Digital. He is a life long New Yorker and lives with his wife and two children in northern Manhattan.
Statement of work (2011)
This work is both a break and a continuation of an exploration into personal story-telling and interpretations. A progressive, yet ambiguous multiple-media form, it is at times deliberately naive and often has a surreal, stream of conscious quality. I am using a time based medium as a tool for introducing the non-linear as a fantasy guide; atomised fragments collide to invoke the mythology of a poet, the lens of the photographer and the camera of the director.
They are psychologically and socially constrained, a marginalized present infused with an unsettled past composed of new worlds which speak of cultural myth and invented narratives. It takes as a starting point strange and remote qualities: unforgiving, romantic and sublime mixed with pastoral traditions in the context of an urban consumerist culture. The synergy of abstract and physical spaces reflect the tension between representation, perception and desire.
The process of assembling each work pushed me to consider the gamut of photographic possibility and to reflect on my own relationship to the photographic image. While sparse and suggestive they are intended to be seen in relation to each other, a sometimes innovative process with all of the unexpected twists.
Statement of work (2009)
My recent video work extends my recent photographic explorations challenging the veracity of documentary practices through the ambiguity of place and persona, manipulation of media, low-fi production and methods of distribution. These short films weave images, poetry, and spoken word performances into recognizable potential histories and narratives, building new relationships between image, word, viewer and artist.
A statement of work (2007)
The essence of my work is in the rendering of everyday situations to which the fantastic can be attributed, the surreal imagined, and the very real evoked.
In the vastness of city life, I am most inspired by the everydayness of things. It is an adventure for reasons I think most people are drawn to cities: you get tested, you find yourself, you lose pieces of yourself–all those almost-private moments in public spaces–where aloneness rather than loneliness tells the story. Just you and the city, quite a pair: raw, wounded, and unapologetic. In the city the glance, not the stare, evokes a stronger moment-a passing–that morphs into revelation as specificity and detail are removed.
I harvest images, the raw materials, by appropriating the street photographer, mise-en-scene and cinema verité traditions. In these “image harvests” I work digitally because this mutability subverts photography’s traditional aesthetic – what once happened to be representational becomes a truly representational form.
