Justin Mezzapelli is an interdisciplinary artist whose curiosity intersects poetics, repetition, domesticity, and queer identity. He honours visual evidence of patience and the passage of time as a method of invitation, while choosing to engage with what we might disregard as mundane, irrelevant things of everyday life. By processes collecting or reclaiming ordinary objects and sampling familiar social concepts, his work manifests as drawing, collage, found material assemblage, and moving-image. With close examination he considers an ever-evolving resiliency of the human condition, suggesting that banal material actually holds accessible, truth-telling potential. Mezzapelli’s practice seeks overall to remind, to slow down, and to archive. His belief is that resourcefulness, an often quiet, unassuming queer responsibility, takes place among the most common activity, yet even here always shifts possibility just enough to register as sublime.
Justin produces digital explorations alongside creative partner and artist, Brigitte Sampogna. Inhabiting realms of the banal, the absurd, and the domestic, their works interrogate alternative methods of communication with the use of semiotics and accidental poetics within 'the home,' as well as contemplate our coexistence with the natural world. Their work has exhibited locally and internationally.
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Justin holds a BFA from OCAD University and is based in Whitby, Ontario.
Illustration work available for purchase at Partial Gallery.
Open to inquiries of any kind.
Justin Mezzapelli beside Give Me This Day My Daily Bread, The Robert McLaughlin Gallery (from The Portrait Backlog, 2022)
Photo by Brigitte Sampogna
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