Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Collage, augmented reality sculpture
Website: rootdivision.org
Alessandro Ravagnan is a self-taught conceptual artist born and raised between New York City and Italy. Early in his career he showed work on the East Coast and in Europe, including at The Other Art Fair (presented by Saatchi Art) in Brooklyn in 2017 and in a curated exhibition at Cleveland’s CAN Triennial in 2018. He has since relocated to San Francisco, where he now lives and works as a Studio Artist at Root Division, the Mission Street nonprofit gallery and studio program for Bay Area artists.
Ravagnan’s practice centers on scientific and spiritual concepts of cosmology, drawing on the “Overview Effect” — the shift in perspective astronauts describe on seeing Earth from space — to picture humans as one strand in a wider, multidimensional web of life. In San Francisco he began collaborating with his husband to extend his flat collage work into augmented-reality sculpture, animating and scoring the pieces with sound. He is also a participating artist in Moon Gallery Foundation’s Peace Moon Poppies, a space-art project that sends a cube of white poppy seeds to the International Space Station as a symbol of multi-planetary pacifism.
He continues to exhibit locally with Root Division, including in its 2025 benefit art auction alongside more than 160 other Bay Area artists.
Ravagnan builds his signature works — collectively an ongoing “Universe” series — by screen-printing patterned sheets, tearing them by hand, and reassembling the torn fragments into balanced compositions. He has described the destruction-and-reconstruction of the process as a form of sitting meditation, akin to gazing meditation practice. Each finished piece is titled for a stage in an “animate universe’s” life cycle — Wyrmling Universe, Old Universe, Mature Adult Universe, Decomposing Mature Adult Universe, Dying Young Adult Universe, Very Old Universe, Uncoiling Adult Universe — treating the composition itself as a living thing passing through birth, maturity, decay, and death.
His outlook fuses pandeist and quantum-physics ideas with Zen Buddhist concepts, and it has carried over into his newer augmented-reality sculptures, which digitize and animate the 2D collage forms so they appear to inhabit an invisible, quantum dimension of space-time. That same cosmological, humanist sensibility underlies Peace Moon Poppies, which reframes a 1934 pacifist symbol — the white poppy of the UK’s Peace Pledge Union — as a seed cube bound for the International Space Station and, eventually, the Moon.
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