Exhibition Dates: June 7 – July 28, 2019
Opening Reception: Friday, June 7th, 5:30 to 8:30pm

“Why talk about a place? A place is so much more cycloramically itself than any way we can describe it that our words and our pictures and postcards and passport stamps amount to stray neutrinos passing through a cathedral.” In his essay on Richard Max Gavrich’s Estraneo, Tim Davis is clear that a body of photographs can reveal little about a place. Photographs can only ask more questions than provide answers. The three photographers, Richard Max Gavrich, Emma Ressel, and Vanessa Kotovich, who traveled to the small, unremarkable town of Lugo, Italy in the summers of 2014, 2016, and 2017, respectively, were acutely aware that their task of making a body of work “about” the town of Lugo was doomed. Instead, they veered sharply away from objective truth, toward something far more instinctual.

To view the three works by Gavrich, Ressel, and Kotovich is to delve into the psychology of making sense of a strange place. Gavrich proudly claimed the identity of stranger, collecting vacant street corners and faceless passersby. He finds Lugo beautiful and monumental, yet ethereally impenetrable. Ressel rejected the reality of Lugo in favor of complete fiction. Meditating on things she tasted, smelled, and witnessed, she created little worlds within the town, bursting with succulent food and macabre narrative. Kotovich sought solace inside the old cathedrals, turning traditional visuals of the church on their head, revealing a kaleidoscopic internal life of the artist within the holy spaces. To view these three vastly different projects together is to assemble a rich and disorienting sense of place.

The town of Lugo has a tendency to shrug off the omnipresent weight of Italian art history in favor of welcoming in contemporary work that comments upon and documents the ever-changing landscape and industrial nature of the North. Photographers have always traveled to the region to add to the conversation. Gavrich, Ressel, and Kotovich successfully avoided preoccupying themselves with what came before and arrived with completely blank slates. As three young photographers, they approached Lugo exactly as they saw it, allowing the liberty of their own visual language to form the projects. When viewed alongside each other, however, threads of continuity between the three series reveal themselves. We see familiar architecture, shapes, and the vast quietness of empty streets. Three different Lugo’s can become one. If you like, you can try to make sense of it all, or you can settle, much like the three artists, in the acceptance of permanent strangeness.

***

This work was made possible by the generous support of the Lugo Land Residency in collaboration with Bard College, organized by Luca Nostri, Francesco Neri, and Tim Davis. The Lugo Land project attempts to investigate the changing face of the Lowlands of Northern Italy through the critical response of contemporary artists.