NEW YORK, NY.- Kristen Lorello presents Scott Alario: Mother, Mother Ocean, a solo exhibition of photograph-based ceramic sculptures. This is Alario’s fifth solo exhibition at Kristen Lorello and is a celebration of the artist’s lifelong commitment to experimentation, collaboration, and love in the genre of photography, a medium that Alario deftly manipulates in both digital and analog formats. In this new, ground-breaking body of work, Alario adapts the two-dimensional medium of photography to the relief surface of wall-based ceramic, in what his close friend and artist peer Judd Schiffman refers to as an embedding of digital imagery and memory onto tactile, geological surfaces.

As told by Scott Alario:

In my visual art practice, I often collaborate with my family to make photographs that reveal what's invisible: movement, time, imagination, affection. Recently I've been working with ceramics, a medium that, like photography, deals with transformation and permanence but also failure and unpredictability. The uncertainty of firing clay reminded me of the analog darkroom's thrilling chemical wonder. In Mother, Mother Ocean, I'm using ceramic decals to transfer black and white photographs onto glazed clay panels that bear the marks of their making: cracks, imperfections and unexpected worlds of color.

These photographs document our family walks and swims along the Crescent Park shoreline near our home on the east side of the upper Narragansett Bay. The beaches here are a dichotomy: fairly bleak post-industrial port city meeting something more naturally hopeful. The ocean brings new trash and treasure to the shore daily. We try to never leave without a bag of both: the valued stuff like pottery, sea glass, coins (which abound from an early 1900s amusement park once here) and the less pleasing trash (the endless plastic) to dispose of more properly. While photographing, Marguerite's pure ecstatic joy coming upon a horseshoe crab molt, for example, was usually enough treasure for me, but occasionally I’d also pocket some trinkets found in the sand. Pieces of colorful glass, a porcelain button, or a bit of a tea cup made their way from the beach and onto my clay panels. Back in the studio, prior to the glaze firing, I’d place the flotsam directly on top with hopes of some alchemical results.

Initially I had planned for the ceramic aspect of this body of work to yield a neutral blank canvas, allowing the photograph to be primary, but the introduction of these found bits of history and my love of color made me too curious. I sprinkled on remnants of bright glazes, pigments and metals alongside what I’d foraged, welcoming the fortuitous tidepools that would form through heat, chemistry and luck. Following the glazing, the photographs were transferred onto the panels using specially printed decals which contain metalic pigments that are fired to permanence at high temperatures. Any interruption to my image from cracking or bubbling became most welcome. Intentional and accidental, permanent and fragile, all at once, I think of them as cradles or nests for my photographs. And, like any vessel meant to hold something precious, they show the strain of that responsibility, of trying to preserve something as impossible as a moment or a feeling, a childhood or even an entire bay.

Scott Alario was born in 1983 in New Haven, CT, and lives and works in Providence, RI. His works are included in the collections of the RISD Museum, the Colby College Museum of Art, Fidelity Investments Corporate Art Collection, and the SoHo House Art Collection, among others. Press includes, The New Yorker, American Photo, Collector Daily, Time LightBox, The Providence Journal, and Vice, among other publications. Alario received a BFA from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in 2006 and an MFA in Photography from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2013. He is a member of the staff of the Art department at Providence College, Providence, RI, and has taught courses on photography at Brown University, Massachusetts College of Art and Design, RISD, and Alfred University, among others. The artist is also an accomplished experimental composer. Alario co-composed the musical scores for Nickel Boys (2024), and Hale County, This Morning, This Evening (2024), both directed by RaMell Ross. His co-score for Hale County, This Morning, This Evening (2024), was the recipient of the Best Music Score award from the 2018 Independent Documentary Association Awards. The artist’s first solo album, 'Sorry I'm Late,' produced by Alex Somers, Alario’s close friend and collaborator since 2024, was released in fall 2020.