• Antique wood foundry mold fragment
• Early 20th Century electrical resistor panel fragment
• Mid-19th Century copper frame with case
• Mid-20th Century photograph
• Porcelain hot water knob
• Copper round head screws
• Copper wire

In this artwork D’Elia fuses playful visual puns with the charged undercurrents of adolescent awakening. A vintage photograph captures a young man mid-disrobing, frozen in that fleeting moment when vision is obscured and the viewer is given the illusion of invisibility.

The old porcelain “HOT” water tap handle and the fragment of an antique resistor box layer metaphor with innuendo: heat, resistance, and the risk of being caught in the act.

The weathered wood of a foundry mold anchors the composition, its industrial past reimagined in service of a more intimate, human narrative. Copper screws and wire trace connections between objects like neural pathways firing, echoing the sudden surge of hormones and electricity that mark the first jolts of desire.

D’Elia’s assemblage speaks with humor and candor about a shared but rarely admitted rite of passage: the charged, split-second glimpses of others that awaken curiosity and longing. In doing so, the work plays in that liminal space between risk and thrill, heat and resistance, where attraction is both dangerous and irresistible.