ENTITY CRAMMING
SOSO CAPALDI AND ERIC ANTHONY BERDIS
Runs / June 6 – July 27, 2025
Reception / Friday, June 6, 6-9 PM
Hours: Sat-Sun from 2-6 PM
This summer Grizzly Grizzly is pleased to present Entity Cramming, a vibrant, two-person exhibition of work by Soso Capaldi and Eric Anthony Berdis. The show celebrates color, play, and material exuberance—offering a maximalist, mythological landscape where whimsy and vulnerability merge. Through immersive drawings, biomorphic forms, and suspended sculptures, Capaldi and Berdis explore personal histories and confront hard conversations—channeling queer joy, spiritual displacement, and personal mythology as means of healing and transformation.
Eric Antony Berdis’s sculptural works hang from the ceiling like otherworldly “Scarecrows”—quilted figures made from handmade paper pulp, found textiles, and thrifted materials. These spectral beings, formed through techniques of appliqué, dyeing, and paper-making, merge ghost, protector, and playmate. Drawing from queer archives and personal mythology, Berdis reimagines survival through joy and excess. His works are richly layered, both visually and emotionally, embracing a maximalist aesthetic while hinting at the fragility of the body and the burden of memory.
Soso Capaldi constructs a parallel universe populated by expressive creatures and relics of self-reflection. Their connect-the-dot drawings, manganese clay sculptures, and lively, colorful sculptures evoke the aesthetics of childhood while delving into themes of reparenting, queerness, and spiritual displacement. The connect the dot drawings which allude to the creatures that inhabit Capaldi’s work, are done with three different inks using a Rapidograph, LAMY safari fountain Pen, and a Pilot Kakuno Fountain Pen on mulberry paper, which has a fabric like texture. Of their creature-forms, Capaldi says, The creatures are accidental teachers who dispense wisdom while I am building them and when I least expect it. When I didn’t have a safe place to live I started to think about where the creatures in my work live...”
Throughout Entity Cramming, Capaldi and Berdis embrace material abundance and playful chaos to make space for difficult dialogue: religion and estrangement, queer joy amid trauma, and the radical act of building new, inclusive worlds. Their work is not an escape but a colorful offering: a speculative terrain of soft resilience and wild beauty. Capaldi and Berdis share a deep commitment to joy as resistance, using craft, color, and fantasy as connective tissue between vulnerability and empowerment. Their works conjure analogous mythologies that offer care and protection to those navigating real-world precarity. Together, their practices propose world-building not as escape, but as a form of survival and communion.
Limited edition 4”x6.5” screen prints by Soso Capaldi will be available for purchase
Artist Bios:
Soso Capaldi is an artist living and working in Philadelphia, PA. They earned an MFA in ceramics from Tyler School of Art and Architecture and a BFA in Drawing and Painting from Penn State University. They are a black, queer artist exploring ideas of religion and spirituality. They work with any medium they can get their hands on. With the help of the creatures in their work, they are hoping to land softly and create safe spaces for themselves and others on paper and in the physical world.
Eric Anthony Berdis (Erie, PA) is an artist and educator whose practice strives to celebrate DIY collectivity and play while reflecting on the ghost of queer history and activism. Berdis has received honors from the Amos Lemon Burkhart Foundation, the Lydia McCain Artist Fellowship, and the DayGlo Color Corp Fund. He has had solo exhibitions at The Marlin and Regina Miller Art Gallery as the Artist in Residence at the Kutztown University of Pennsylvania, The Abington Art Center, the University Galleries of Illinois State University, Random Access Gallery (Syracuse, NY), Project 1612 (Peoria, IL), Practice Gallery (Philadelphia, PA), and 934 Gallery (Columbus, OH).