BEAUTIFUL SEVEN - SAN LUIS OBISPO MUSEUM OF ART - SOLO 2024
Returning to San Luis Obispo after their monumental mural on the back of the Fremont Theater in 2021, interdisciplinary artist Maria Molteni presents their exhibition Beautiful Seven at the San Luis Obispo Museum of Art. Building upon an ongoing project Counting to Infinity, Beautiful Seven gathers around a set of fifty hand drawings and found stones. Colored fingers reflect Molteni’s childhood habit of counting Hail Marys on their hands, like a decade of rosary prayer beads. The work reflects the artist’s avid interest in the Pleiades star cluster (a theme of their Seven Sisters mural in SLO), an original deck of playing and divination cards that reference the popular Italian game Scopa (meaning “broom,” or “to sweep”) and the artist’s pilgrimage to Southern Italy’s Seven Sisters – historic Marian miracle sites sacred to the mountainous region of Campania, where worship of the Madonna is an active part of life.
Connecting to the exhibition title, the term Settebello literally means “beautiful seven”, naming the luckiest card in the game of Scopa. The imagery in Molteni’s original deck, Stelle Scopa (meaning “sweeping stars”) pulls from their drawings and references sacred stone collecting as bead/body-based prayer. Stelle Scopa departs slightly from tradition to include five suits, with terrestrial planets in place of typical Court cards, and a set of eleven asteroids. Sixty-one total cards equals the full number of beads on a Rosary. Tabletop mosaic constellations, hand rolled beads made from rose mud, two video works set to sounds of the Moon and Venus, seven portal-like grottos (small cave-like altars), open hands modeled after Virgin Mary statues common in Italy, and respective handcrafted brooms further explore themes of queerness, intersectional feminism and gender expansiveness with a lens towards inner spirituality and cosmic cycles.
Molteni began this series serendipitously on the Great Solar Eclipse of 2017, when they found their first Italian Scopa card on the bottom of the Adriatic Sea. This discovery is representative of Molteni’s multi-disciplinary practice, where elements from diverse spiritual influences converge and inform each other, and the natural world — shells, lagoons, comets, stars — hold significant meaning. In 2024, Molteni returned to Italy in community with fellow queer and trans Italian-American artists. Using specific holy sites as research — and the offerings and energies left there, Molteni invites us to extend beyond binaries through play and prayer.
