We're really "branching" out into new forms of art at Mulberry Street Library with our latest exhibition by neighborhood artist Tony Jannetti. Jannetti's exhibit, called "The Not-Seen Ubiquitous - Visual Works by Tony Jannetti" is on view at Mulberry Street branch through October 31, 2015.

Jannetti utilizes tree branches and vines that are woven into sculptural forms, that have embraced our library's walls on the Ground Floor. Other works are prints of natural forms that have been abstracted by digital manipulation. I spoke with Tony recently about his work.

Your work in this exhibit deals with natural themes using both actual objects gathered from nature (branches) and also digital images of woods and streams. Can you talk a little about how this work came about, and what it means to you?

The “branches” work is something I was taken with and started exploring as a teenager. However, my mother did not see it as I did. I came home from school to discover my incipient collection thrown out in the woods behind our house. I worked in landscape through my senior year of college (Pratt). Most of those paintings were given away or stolen. I stepped away from it through my journeyman years, opting instead for a more analytic approach to my work. Landscape as subject matter slowly revived through my friendship with artist Joe DiGiorgio, and subsequently while at my place upstate. I was in the process of moving my studio upstate. It was a lean period work—and money-wise, and I was at frayed ends about making work. A large number of branches got dumped in my yard. I got upset at first, then immediately decided it was art material. And so it came to be. Those works are from the mid-2000s (none of those works are in this show). I am always surprised in a moment by something I see in a landscape or in a plant or tree. It’s always a source of wonder. And the analytic aspect of it all remains.

What kinds of media do you like to work in and explore?

I spent earlier years in watercolor, printmaking, sculpture, and collage. Somewhere in the nineties, I started feeling a greater rift between myself and all the media I had been working with. As far back as the '80s, I was aware that artists were using the computer to prepare studies from which they worked in oil painting and sculpture. In the early 21st, I decided to throw myself into digital artmaking wholeheartedly, and that’s where I am now. At first I explored abstracted graphic treatments of numbers (not included in this installation, and another area for exhibition). Initially, I considered the computer an assist to printmaking, and it is, but it has grown beyond that as I continue to work. I credit Fred Gutzeit’s use of the computer back in the 1990s as the nudge I needed.

You credit Duchamp as being an influence in conceiving of this show in this particular neighborhood, can you explain his relationship to Little Italy and what that means to you as an artist?

I would credit Duchamp for being the one artist whose thought process continues to tickle my own creative thinking. Consider the time during which he made his works, his thinking is clear, and timeless, still so present-tense. Would I be hanging sections of vines as art if he had not created his readymades a century ago, or had not dropped a meter of string onto pieces of wood? This neighborhood is one he visited regularly; he must have found some charm here. It has become my own neighborhood. I have family roots and connections to streets and buildings, most of them now gone; I live nearby and have been here for 40+ years. The Pierre Cabanne book, recommended to me by Brooke Alexander, was a delightful read. I was reading it at the same time I arrived and began exploring the area. I don’t recall whether it was Judy Linn, then on Elizabeth Street, who pointed out the cemetery across the street, with its iron doors and chain holes that allowed us to peer into it. It’s something any curious person would be sure to find. I do know it was Judy who knew of the Duchamp work in Philadelphia. I joined her and some college friends at the Philadelphia Museum, and it was she who guided me to that posthumous work.

Who else are some of your major artistic influences and inspirations?

OK, at this moment (and this is a mish-mash): Jasper Johns, Stuart Davis, Arthur Dove, Saul Steinberg, Joseph Cornell, Joyce Wieland, through whom I met Michael Snow, and through him, learned of Philip Glass, Steve Reich. More immediately and personally, Judy Linn, ace photographer from the start, the late dancer Lee Connor, Meredith Monk, Ping Chong, Thomas Nozkowski, Joyce Robins, Robert Mapplethorpe, Fred Gutzeit, and Joseph DiGiorgio. They are mix of inspirations and influences!

How did you become involved in the arts in this community?

I was very lucky, though I didn’t realize it at the time. I landed here because it was then inexpensive to live and work, space was affordable, and there was an existing community of artists all around in a city bursting as the world’s art center. Friends from school were in this neighborhood, the East Village and Lower East Side. Everything was walkable. Galleries in SoHo were a new phenomenon. It was where my generation landed.

How have you seen it change over the years?

Generally speaking, the rough edges are being smoothed over as more affluent types discover our neighborhoods and bring their changes. I recall an illustration from a school book that featured the Old St. Patrick’s school building heading up a story about Mother Cabrini. Was she here in this neighborhood? The school is gone, and will now be home to very wealthy people. The city renews itself, but seems to be ossifying in the process. That’s probably a misperception. The loss of the mixture of ethnicities and classes is to be mourned. The odd inspiration is a bit more elusive. While it’s more difficult to activate that creative impulse now than previously, I’m glad the impulse is still there. Some of the works in the installation are from the greater neighborhood.

What attracted you to displaying your work in a public library?

Artist Fred Gutzeit had a show here and is an old friend. He asked me to help moving his paintings back to his studio, which is across the street from me. Coincidentally, Fred had bought a house upstate in the same hamlet I had a place in, quite by chance. I was unaware of the practice of showing at a library, aside from the wonderful works that grace(d) the 42nd Street library. And, I hadn’t shown any work in the city in almost two decades, and I was finally beginning to make progress with the digital works. The library has these wonderfully inviting areas on which to hang work, and I thought a small show could easily work where I might present some new ideas. I originally conceived a different kind of show, but the first opening available was far enough into the future that I developed an entirely different range of work that is on view.

What are you reading right now?

The New Yorker. My subscription had expired and now I am trying to catch up. And there’s a stack of books awaiting opening. Tracking the Serpent, poems by Janine Pommy Vega, a reread of How to Write by Gertrude Stein, works about the Catskills by Norman Van Valkenburgh; several books by John McPhee, two by David McCullough, a book on Ellsworth Kelly, and I want to reread Tristram Shandy. (No! I didn’t view that film… impossible to translate that book to film). However, videos do tend to pull me away from books. Most recently I’ve been watching social consciousness Japanese films from the 1950s and the films of Robert Bresson. He’s so good!

Please visit the artists' website at http://www.tonyjannetti.com/.