How and when have you decided to become an artist?

My family immigrated from Italy to Canada when I was two years old. Our house was full of Italian culture, opera and art. As long as I can remember, I’ve always wanted to be an artist and so my father traded opera lessons from a well-known local artist and in return my sister and I learned some pretty sophisticated techniques at a young age. I enrolled at OCAD for art and painting, but was totally taken by a photography class I took in my 4th year. I stopped going to class and shot as much as I could, experimenting until I achieved a painterly style by accident. I developed and printed my own photos and in that time I became super focused about every detail that went into an image.
My mother was going to be a nun and my father was an atheist so we had very interesting dinner conversations growing up. This had a great influence on me. It is literally a marriage of complete opposites. I carried that into my work being drawn to the beautiful and the decaying, light and dark, the body and the spirit, the conscious and unconscious. The pendulum of opposites, extremes colliding to create a type of friction that I put into my work. This is what excites me to create.
Then I was asked to create a site specific art installation for 2016 Nuit Blanche in Toronto and I created a piece called PNEUMA that dealt with these themes. In this piece I wanted to visually explore the idea of the body as the vehicle to move past the physical, towards a spiritual transcendence. I’ve always looked to the unconscious and the power of dreams, but in using my body to harness power in a physical sense, I wonder what does it mean to be fully awake? Ancient Greek medicine spoke of the pneuma — the ‘breath of life’ — as the mediator between the brain and heart, the body and spirit. Similarly, in this performance the viewer sees me struggling between my active and receptive selves, in a play between the creative and spiritual processes.
Pneuma is a site-specific installation utilizing the Freedom Arches of Nathan Phillips Square as a frame for a two-sided water screen with reflections and imagery thrown in constant flux, transforming reality, and mimicking our ever-changing consciousness and connection to our identity/self.