Georgio Lorio

George Lorio was born and raised in New Orleans. It was and continues to be a place of extremes: beauty and decay, religion and ritual, custom and iconoclasm. From that experience, he acquired an excitement for visual matters. At the time of the 9/11 bombing in NYC, Lorio was a professor at the University of Texas in Brownsville on the Mexican border; this trauma expanded his vision. He was challenged by the ambient drug wars and the collapsing Mexican democracy due to endemic political corruption. Seeing the lack of commitment for resolving dialogue concerned with the growing racial division, wealth inequality, and environmental decline in the US, he began to use toys with which he developed sculptures that poignantly comment on adult concerns in the guise of ironic constructions of found playthings. Collage and assemblage synthesize the imagery.