Like René Magritte’s painting of a pipe with the sentence “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” (“This is not a pipe”) beneath it, Orietta Crispino writes “This is not about the past” on the wall behind her early in her solo show Let Me Cook for You. But over the next two-plus hours she talks a lot about her mother—deceased since 1994—as well as about the relatives she lived with growing up, her attempt at age 17 to meet the father she’d only recently learned was still alive, and the many times she has moved (at least 35 total in four different places in Italy and the U.S.). In other words: about the past.
