Adriana DiNapoli — CalArts Post Grad Show Y25

Adriana DiNapoli

(Photo/Media MFA 25)
IG: @lightleaksphoto

Peignoirs en porcelain; Hangups, 2025

Adriana DiNapoli’s Peignoirs en porcelain and Hangups layer the language of domestic display with the intimacy of the body, examining how femininity has been trophied, preserved, and fractured over time. Peignoirs en porcelain is an assemblage of intimate sculptures that transform everyday materials into meditations on the constraints and tenderness of women’s domestic and erotic lives. Four vintage tea saucers are mounted on the wall in a soft zigzag formation, their floral patterns reminiscent of inherited tableware passed down through generations. Each plate holds a Polaroid emulsion transfer depicting a young woman in vintage lingerie. The images are intimate yet composed, dreamy, drawing on the glamour of old Hollywood, and the delicate “promised life” of a good housewife.

Hangups rests beneath the plates. A smashed green rotary telephone is still plugged into the wall; the shattered plastic reveals the inner wiring, the unseen mechanics of communication and control. The destruction was not staged in a single act of force, but occurred through an experiment. The phone was packed in checked airline luggage without protective wrap or “Fragile” stickers. Though the suitcase emerged seemingly unharmed, the object inside had been violently transformed. This breaking, this destruction through routine transport, reflects DiNapoli’s broader inquiry into the quiet violences that occur beneath the surface of everyday life. Women’s experiences can be damaged, even destroyed, within the structures meant to carry or support them. Together, the works evoke the contradictions of womanhood as both spectacle and subject. DiNapoli uses nostalgia not as comfort, but as critique, reanimating mid-century aesthetics. She aims to expose the domestic and erotic expectations placed on women that are resurfacing in today’s political climate.

PROXY CHIMERA ORACLE

CalArts 2025