Aver Vero is an expanded series of Dominic Terlizzi’s acrylic mosaics made with mold and paint techniques. Aver Vero translates to announcing truth or to declare what is known. Earlier incarnations of the molded works were titled Zero Hero Yolo Solo.

This series features a common object alphabet that transforms minutia to grandeur. Cosmic mosaic architecture and hybrid image-weaving build object fields that question authorship, authenticity, labor, origin, architecture, ornamentation, and algorithmic systems. Color spectrums and tactile surface cohabitate retinal grounds simultaneously sobering and psychedelic.

There is nothing, nothingness, absence, place-holding, bottom, base, and abject. Balanced between light/positive and darkness/negative is the gray/zero. The symbol of breads, crackers, napkins, leaves, trim molding, paper towels, envelopes, and tongue depressors are cast in primary color blends establishing a starting point. The place of an event as in ‘ground zero’. The objects are increments of exchange, the origin of recipe, leavening, repetition, memory, domestication, refinement of seed, germination. They are the manufactured, consumed, nameless, and discarded resurrected as circles, loops, ellipses, orbs, windows, or zeros.
There is the transformation from nothing into something, from forgotten to remembered, and discarded to collected. With deftness and skill, production finds a way forward. With accumulation, craft becomes grandiose, triumphant, and victorious. Against all odds the underdog hand of common objects escapes class schema and academic structure, as the visionary or new bread. The synthetic collides against history. In narrative, an affliction leads to a journey as skills are acquired. The Hero fixes a scenario, defeats a force of oppression, a history, or a part of self. Facing history, canons, precedents, predecessors, self, and scene the artist tempers language and wills an experience unavailable.
There is embracing death and flatness. Multiple replications of consumed increments live once in sublime moments of color. A pixel, a star, a snowflake are all clustered together. Through weaving, a non-digital residue arises that brings monumental composition back to incremental assembly. By throwing caution to logic the risk of subject becomes systematically relative, a hierarchy of belief in a moment present or in a surface present. Living now, against self-preservation, acting in the moment with self-interest, risking health or reputation for surface satisfaction. Obfuscating a precise end or read allowing life.
There is the singular identity becoming a collective. A product of diverse impulses produced by industrial mechanisms returning to the singular hand, transformed alone, guided by nothing, following no one, without formal allegiance, rogue behavior, unaccompanied, unencumbered, without care of, not backed, independently, lacking company (latin-cum(with)-pane(bread)). Trying to steal the awesomeness and power of history, others, officials, academies, corporations, gods, and muses. To usurp a view for ones own gratification to know an existence apart, a part.

Dominic Terlizzi is a Baltimore area native and currently lives, teaches, and works in Baltimore. He received an MFA from Hoffberger School of Painting MICA 2008 and a BFA from The Cooper Union NYC 2003. His work has been exhibited in Baltimore, NYC, London, Washington, Delaware, and Mars. He is faculty at MICA, Towson University, and PI Art NYC. He has taught and lectured in Cebu City Philippines, Seoul South Korea, Jeju Island South Korea, and Beijing China. He received the Maryland Artist Equity Grant, Hoffberger School of Painting Award, Triangle Workshop Fellowship, and the PNC Transformative Art Project Grant. His monumental sculpture with the Remington Baltimore neighborhood, Seawall, and Gensler will be unveiled Jan 2014.