Dracula Is In This Room

Madeleine Fratarcangelo, MFA 2023, Sculpture

Madeleine Fratarcangelo casts the body as a tool of production, making thousands of plaster tiles to construct a perfect infinite projection — a raised floor interrupted by a cut on two sides. This stage is unwalkable, unenterable, and evidences scant trace of the artist’s hand. It is a sterile un-invitation to dance with the burdened vampire whose name echoes out from the room unseen. Her work tastes of a frightened insistence against something new, and a harried concealment of something dangerously autobiographical. It is, as written by Pessoa, a dream of a new sort — a soft and shapeless thing, that reverberates like the white whorls of ocean rising up from the depths of a vast truth: a body made of nostalgia with a soul of foam, repose, death.