Using her noodle: In Lisa Venditelli's works, message and medium are intertwined

SAN DIEGO - The iconography is familiar: The Virgin Mary is ascending to heaven. Lisa Venditelli's version of it even has the look of an aging tapestry. But somehow, it's hard to imagine an artist of any era except ours weaving such an image from pasta. Collage and conceptual art provide the necessary precedents.

For Venditelli, pasta is a prime material, and has been for nearly a decade.
And her show at San Diego's David Zapf Gallery, "Mary Magdalene and Friends: A Survey Exhibition," provides a good sense of how surprising her uses of it have been. For a recent installation at the city's Museum of Contemporary Art, she made pictorial panels resembling stained glass windows and a chandelier, among other intricate things.

The chandelier is on display in Zapf's space, as are her mock tapestries.

She was no less ambitious and obsessive for her Master of Fine Arts exhibition at Mills College in Northern California back in 1997, completed shortly before she moved to San Diego. It was part of a show that included 4,999 small likenesses of the Virgin Mary rendered in rows on stretch after stretch of lasagna noodles and a vast pasta floor.

Venditelli, who grew up outside Boston, began her art schooling believing she'd be an illustrator. She studied at the Rhode Island School of Design with such luminaries as Chris van Allsburg and David Macaulay.

Painting may have been her main passion, but she thought creating work for children's books could be a halfway pragmatic way to apply her talents.

"Everybody was telling me to do something which you can make money at," recalls Venditelli.

By the time she relocated to the Bay Area in the late 1980s to join her husband-to-be - they married in 1991 and have two boys, ages 4 and 7 - Venditelli knew it was futile to resist her desire to be an artist. Yet just what kind of artist wasn't exactly clear.

"I knew there were things I wanted to say and I was frustrated by my paintings."

Hung Liu, a graduate of University of California San Diego's MFA program and one of her professors at Mills, encouraged her to "dig deeper, make it more personal."

Venditelli embraced the advice and found her major subject: her Italian-American heritage and its relationship to being a woman in this culture.

"The more I thought about the women in my family, the stranger it became, how you're supposed to be both like the Virgin Mary and Sophia Loren."

Still, it wasn't just message she was after, but how message and medium could become inseparable.

This approach has taken many shapes. In her current show, sausage casings and lace become dress forms in "Salsiccie/Suck in Your Gut." The image of the Virgin Mary in "Aura Della Madonna" appears in the middle of a colander that is itself at the center of an altarpiece with a design of pasta set against red velveteen. Like other works by Venditelli, "Aura" possesses wit that isn't cutting but is sharply focused.

"I like the work to have different layers. Some people see it as one-dimensional. Some see it as having many different levels. It's meant to be open-ended."