2017 - Weston Art Gallery, Cincinnati, OH
Self-sufficiency and the agency to craft one’s own world were core principles of 1960s back-to-the-earth and counterculture movements, but these ideas have also been fundamental to groups and individuals claiming less altruistic revolutionary intentions. The Curiosity Motive is a phrase borrowed from Ted Kaczynski’s 1995 essay “Industrial Society and Its Future,” which was written in an isolated cabin in Montana. Under threats of violence from Kaczynski, the Washington Post published the 35,000-word manifesto on September 19, 1995. This declaration of a deranged man posits that genuine scientific inquiry is simply a myth, created to conceal the greed and self-interest that drives an industrialized society to exploit the natural world and subjugate human beings. In stressing the give-and-take relationship between necessity, nature, and technology, I hope to reconsider our understanding of legacies of resistance and the myths that surround them.
Nate Ricciuto's pimped-up psychedelic man-trike and spaced-out survivalist installations lead the viewer down a wormhole of sic-fi aesthetic and narrative non sequitur. Their initial oddness is magnetic, and upon engagement we find ourselves within a conceptually airy atmosphere that allows us to choose our own adventure through a glorious jumble of half-implied story lines.
- Ben Wright (excerpted from New Glass Review 38, Corning Museum of Glass)