Elisabetta Di Maggio

Elisabetta Di Maggio’s site-specific Wallpaper (all works 2012) is made of hand-cut tissue paper, her medium of choice since 1991, which here climbs upward around a supporting column between the gallery’s two rooms like pale moss on a tree bark. A standout work in “I Change but I Cannot Die,” it was originally conceived last November for the Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa in Venice. The piece shuns architectural integrity for something more overgrown, recalling the vertiginous origin of the artwork’s material and how it adeptly fits to shifts in the environment.

For Victoria, Di Maggio cut into three brown lily pads from the Amazon, each with an intricate network of engorged, though now dry, veins. Installed separately, they resemble organic suction cups that cling to the white walls of the gallery. Over the floor, Di Maggio abstractly hints at the leftover flight path of a nectar-hungry butterfly in Butterfly Flight Trajectory #05, a delicate, unraveled ribbon of strung-together metal pins that swirl and dive in buzzing nonlinearity. The show’s title comes from a line in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem “The Cloud” (1880), and it encourages us to see these works accordingly, favoring the quiet metamorphosis of strung-up particles and the kinds of thoughts that accumulate through unintended pathways.

Translated from Italian by Marguerite Shore.